It is useless, of course, to complain of the terminology of science, since inaccurate names, that connote too many things, or that are otherwise lacking in precision, would be productive of continual mischief. But indispensable as this distinctive nomenclature is, it is, no doubt, often needlessly uncouth, and it has been well said that if the language of common life were equally invariable and unelastic, imagination would be cancelled, and genius crushed. How barbarous and repulsive appear many of the long, polysyllabic, technical names of plants and flowers in our treatises on botany, when compared with such popular names as “Stag-beetle,” “Rosemary,” and “Forget-me-not!” To express the results of science without the ostentation of its terms, is an admirable art, known, unfortunately, to but few. How few surgeons can communicate in simple, intelligible language to a jury, in a law case, the results of a post-mortem examination! Almost invariably the learned witness finds a wound “in the parieties of the abdomen, opening the peritoneal cavity”; or an injury of some “vertebra in the dorsal or lumbar region”; or something else equally frightful. Some years ago, in one of the English courts, a judge rebuked a witness of this kind by saying, “You mean so and so, do you not, sir?”—at the same time translating his scientific barbarisms into a few words of simple English. “I do, my Lord.” “Then why can’t you say so?” He had said so, but in a foreign tongue.

To all the writers and speakers who needlessly employ grandiose or abstract terms, instead of plain Saxon ones, we would say, as Falstaff said to Pistol: “If thou hast any tidings whatever to deliver, prithee deliver them like a man of this world!” Never, perhaps, did a college professor give a better lesson in rhetoric than was given by a plain farmer in Kennebec County, Maine, to a schoolmaster. “You are excavating a subterranean channel, it seems,” said the pedagogue, as he saw the farmer at work near his house. “No, sir,” was the reply, “I am only digging a ditch.” A similar rebuke was once administered by the witty Governor Corwin, of Ohio, to a young lady who addressed him in high-flown terms. During a political tour through the State, he and the Hon. Thomas Ewing stayed at night at the house of a leading politician, but found no one at home but his niece, who presided at the tea-table. Having never conversed with “great men” before, she supposed she must talk to them in elephantine language. “Mr. Ewing, will you take condiments in your tea, sir?” inquired the young lady. “Yes, miss, if you please,” replied the Senator. Corwin’s eyes twinkled. Here was a temptation that could not be resisted. Gratified at the apparent success of her trial in talking to the United States Senator, the young lady addressed Mr. Corwin in the same manner,—“Will you take condiments in your tea, sir?” “Pepper and salt, but no mustard,” was the prompt reply, which the lady, it is said, never forgave, declaring that the Governor was “horridly vulgar.”

The faults of all those who thus barbarize our tongue would be comparatively excusable, were it so barren of resources that any man whose conceptions are clear need find difficulty in wreaking them upon expression. But the language in which Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson have sung; in which Hume, Gibbon, Froude, Motley, and Prescott have narrated; in which Addison, Swift, Newman, and Ruskin have written; and in which Bolingbroke, Chatham, Fox, Pitt, and Webster have spoken, needs not to ask alms of its neighbors. Not only these, but a hundred other masters, have shown that it is rich enough for all the exigencies of the human mind; that it can express the loftiest conceptions of the poet, portray the deepest emotions of the human heart; that it can convey, if not the fripperies, at least the manly courtesies of polite life, and make palpable the profoundest researches of the philosopher. It is not, therefore, because of the poverty of our vocabulary that so many writers Gallicize and Germanize our tongue; the real cause is hinted at in the answer of Handel to an ambitious musician, who attributed the hisses of his hearers to a defect in the instrument on which he was playing: “The fault is not there, my friend,” said the composer, jealous of the honor of the organ, on which he himself performed; “the fact is, you have no music in your soul.”

We are aware that the English tongue,—our own cartilaginous tongue, as some one has quaintly styled it,—has been decried, even by poets who have made it discourse the sweetest music, for its lack of expressive terms, and for its excess in consonants, guttural, sibilant, or mute. It was this latter peculiarity, doubtless, which led Charles V, three centuries ago, to compare it to the whistling of birds; and others since, from the predominance of the s, to the continued hissing of red-hot iron in water. Madame de Stael likens it to the monotonous sound of the surge breaking on the sea-shore; and even Lord Byron,—whose own burning verse, distinguished not less by its melody than by its incomparable energy, has signally revealed the hidden harmony that lies in our short Saxon words,—turns traitor to his native language, and in a moment of caprice denounces it for its harshness:

It is strange that the poet could not see that, in this very selection of condemnatory terms, he has strikingly shown the wondrous expressiveness of the tongue he censures. What can be softer, more musical, or more beautifully descriptive, than the “gentle liquids gliding,” and the words “breathe of the sweet South”; and where among all the languages of the “sweet South” would he have found words so well fitted to point his sarcasm, so saturated with harshness, as the terms “harsh,” “uncouth,” “northern,” “whistling,” “grunting,” “guttural,” “hiss,” “spit,” and “sputter?” It has been well said that “the hand that possesses strength and power may have as delicate a touch, when needed, as the hand of nervous debility. The English language can drop the honeyed words of peace and gentleness, and it can visit with its withering, scathing, burning, blasting curse.” Again, even Addison, who wrote so musical English, contrasting our own tongue with the vocal beauty of the Greek, and forgetting that the latter is the very lowest merit of a language, being merely its sensuous merit, calls it brick as against marble. Waller, too, ungrateful to the noble tongue that has preserved his name, declares that

Because smoothness is one of the requisites of verse, it has been hastily concluded that languages in which vowels and liquids predominate must be better adapted to poetry, and that the most mellifluous must also be the most melodious. But so far is this from being true, that, as Henry Taylor has remarked, in dramatic verse our English combinations of consonants are invaluable, both in giving expression to the harsher passions, and in impairing keenness and significancy to the language of discrimination, and especially to that of scorn.

The truth is, our language, so far from being harsh, or poor and limited in its vocabulary, is the richest and most copious now spoken on the globe. As Sir Thomas More long ago declared: “It is plenteous enough to expresse our myndes in anythinge whereof one man hath used to speak with another.” Owing to its composite character, it has a choice of terms expressive of every shade of difference in the idea, compared with which the vocabulary of many other modern tongues is poverty itself. But for the impiety of the act, those who speak it might well raise a monument to the madcaps who undertook the tower of Babel; for, as the mixture of many bloods has made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the mingling of divers tongues given them a language which is one of the noblest vehicles of thought ever vouchsafed to man. This very mingling of tongues in our language has been made the ground of an accusation against it; and the Anglo-Saxon is sometimes told by foreigners that he “has been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps”; that his dialect is “the alms-basket of wit,” made up of beggarly borrowings, and is wholly lacking in originality.

It is true that the Anglo-Saxon has pillaged largely from the speech of other peoples; that he has a craving desire to annex, not only states and provinces, even whole empires, to his own, but even the best parts of their languages; that there is scarce a tongue on the globe which his absorbing genius has not laid under contribution to enrich the exchequer of his all-conquering speech. Strip him of his borrowings,—or “annexations,” if you will,—and he would neither have a foot of soil to stand upon, nor a rag of language in which to clothe his shivering ideas. To say nothing of the Greek, Latin, and French, which enter so largely into the woof of the tongue, we are indebted to the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindoo, and even the North American Indian dialects, for many words which we cannot do without. The word-barks of our language are daily increasing in size, and terms that sprang up at Delhi and Benares four thousand years ago are to-day scaling the cliffs of the Rocky Mountains. But while the English has thus borrowed largely from other tongues, and the multifarious etymology of “its Babylonish vocabulary,” as its enemies are pleased to call it, renders it, of all modern languages, one of the most difficult to master in all its wealth and power, yet it makes up in eclecticism, vigor, and abundance far more than it loses in apparent originality. Mosaic-like and heterogeneous as are its materials, it is yet no mingle-mangle or patchwork, but is as individual as the French or the German. Though the rough materials are gathered from a hundred sources, yet such is its digestive and assimilative energy that the most discordant aliments, passing through its anaconda-like stomach, are as speedily identified with its own independent existence as the beefsteak which yesterday gave roundness to the hinder symmetry of a prize ox becomes to-morrow part and parcel of the proper substance,—the breast, leg, or arm,—of an Illinois farmer.

In fact the very caprices and irregularities of our idiom, orthography, and pronunciation, which make foreigners “stare and gasp,” and are ridiculed by our own philological ultraists, are the strongest proofs of the nobleness and perfection of our language. It is the very extent to which these caprices, peculiar idioms, and exceptions prevail in any tongue, that forms the true scale of its worth and beauty; and hence we find them more numerous in Greek than in Latin,—in French or Italian than in Irish or Indian. There is less symmetry in the rugged, gnarled oak, with the grotesque contortions of its branches, which has defied the storms of a thousand years, than in the smoothly clipped Dutch yew tree; but it is from the former that we hew out the knees of mighty line-of-battle ships, while a vessel built of the latter would go to pieces in the first storm. It was our own English that sustained him who soared “above all Greek, above all Roman fame”; and the same “well of English undefiled” did not fail the myriad-minded dramatist, when

Nor have even these great writers, marvellous and varied as is their excellence, fathomed the powers of the language for grand and harmonious expression, or used them to the full. It has “combinations of sound grander than ever rolled through the mind of Milton; more awful than the mad gasps of Lear; sweeter than the sighs of Desdemona; more stirring than the speech of Antony; sadder than the plaints of Hamlet; merrier than the mocks of Falstaff.” To those, therefore, who complain of the poverty or harshness of our tongue, we may say, in the words of George Herbert: