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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

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?

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.

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] .

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:

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.

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 use 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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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:

‘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 exclu sive 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.

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.

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.

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,

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,

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.

Or take again the words, ‘to prose’ or a ‘proser’. It cannot indeed be affirmed that they convey any moral condemnation, yet they certainly con 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:

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.

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 fication 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”.

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.

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

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