Read Ebook: Words; Their Use and Abuse by Mathews William

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1371 lines and 154237 words, and 28 pages

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS 1

THE MORALITY IN WORDS 62

GRAND WORDS 105

SMALL WORDS 139

WORDS WITHOUT MEANING 158

SOME ABUSES OF WORDS 177

SAXON WORDS, OR ROMANIC? 194

THE SECRET OF APT WORDS 210

THE SECRET OF APT WORDS 229

ONOMATOPES 242

THE FALLACIES IN WORDS 257

THE FALLACIES IN WORDS 295

NAMES OF MEN 323

NICKNAMES 345

CURIOSITIES OF LANGUAGE 367

COMMON IMPROPRIETIES OF SPEECH 424

INDEX 481

WORDS; THEIR USE AND ABUSE.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS.

"Speech is morning to the mind; It spreads the beauteous images abroad, Which else lie dark and buried in the soul."

La parole, cette main de l'esprit.--CHARRON.

Syllables govern the world.--COKE.

"When a new world leaps out at his command, And ready nature waits upon his hand; When the ripe colors soften and unite, And sweetly melt into just shade and light; When mellowing years their full perfection give And each bold figure just begins to live. The treacherous colors the fair art betray, And all the bright creation fades away."

Not so with words. The language which embodies the ideas and emotions of a great poet or thinker, though entrusted to perishable ink and paper, which a moth or a few drops of water may destroy, is indestructible, and, when his body has turned to dust, he continues to rule men by the power of his thought,--not "from his urn," like a dead hero whose deeds only are remembered, but by his very spirit, living, breathing and speaking in his works. Look at the "winged words" of old Homer, into which he breathed the breath of his own spiritual life; how long have they kept on the wing! For twenty-five or thirty centuries they have maintained their flight across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion; and they are still full of the life-blood of immortal youth. "The 'Venus' of Apelles, and the 'grapes' of Zeuxis have vanished, and the music of Timotheus is gone; but the bowers of Circe still remain unfaded, and the 'chained Prometheus' has outlived the 'Cupid' of Praxiteles, and the 'brazen bull' of Perillus."

"How forcible," says Job, "are right words!" "A word fitly spoken," says Solomon, "is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." No artificer's hand, however cunning, can contrive a mechanism comparable with those masterpieces of ingenuity that may be wrought by him who can convey a great or noble thought in apt and vivid words. A mosaic of words may be made more beautiful than any of inlaid precious stones. Few persons have duly estimated the power of language. In anatomical museums one will sometimes see the analysis of a man,--that is, the mere chemical constituents, so much lime, so much albumen, so much phosphorus, etc. These dead substances fail not more utterly in representing a living man, with his mental and moral force, than do the long rows of words in the lexicon of exhibiting the power with which, as signs of ideas, they may be endowed. Language has been truly pronounced the armory of the human mind, which contains at once the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. Look at a Webster or a Calhoun, when his mighty enginery of thought is in full operation; how his words tell upon his adversary, battering down the intrenchments of sophistry like shot from heavy ordnance! Cannon-shot are very harmless things when piled up for show; so are words when tiered up in the pages of a dictionary, with no mind to select and send them home to the mark. But let them receive the vitalizing touch of genius, and how they leap with life; with what tremendous energy are they endowed! When the little Corsican bombarded Cadiz at the distance of five miles, it was deemed the very triumph of engineering; but what was this paltry range to that of words, which bombard the ages yet to come? "Scholars," says Sir Thomas Browne, "are men of peace. They carry no arms, but their tongues are sharper than Actus his razors; their pens carry further and make a louder report than thunder. I had rather stand the shock of a basalisco than the fury of a merciless pen."

The words which a man of genius selects are as much his own as his thoughts. They are not the dress, but the incarnation, of his thought, as the body contains the soul. As John Foster once said, "his diction is not the clothing of his sentiments, it is the skin; and to alter the language would be to flay the sentiments alive." Analyze a speech by either of the great orators I have just named, and a critical study will satisfy you that the crushing force of his arguments lies not less in the nicety and skill with which the words are chosen, than in the granite-like strength of his thought. Attempt to substitute other words for those that are used, and you will find that the latter are part and parcel of the speaker's mind and conception; that every word is accommodated with marvellous exactness to all the sinuosities of the thought; that not even the most insignificant term can be changed without marring the force and completeness of the author's idea. If any other words can be used than those which a writer does use, he is a bungling rhetorician, and skims only the surface of his theme. True as this is of the best prose, it is doubly true of the best poetry; it is a linked strain throughout. It has been said by one who was himself a consummate master of language, that if, in the recollection of any passage of Shakespeare, a word shall escape your memory, you may hunt through the forty thousand words in the language, and not one shall fit the vacant place but that which the poet put there. Though he uses only the simplest and homeliest terms, yet "you might as well think," says Coleridge, "of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of the finished passages of Shakespeare."

Who needs to be told how much the wizard sorcery of Milton depends on the words he uses? It is not in what he directly tells us that his spell lies, but in the immense suggestiveness of his verse. In Homer, it has been justly said, there are no hidden meanings, no deeps of thought into which the soul descends for lingering contemplation; no words which are key-notes, awakening the spirit's melodies,--

"Untwisting all the links that tie The hidden soul of harmony."

But here is the realm of Milton's mastery. He electrifies the mind through conductors. His words, as Macaulay declares, are charmed. Their meaning bears no proportion to their effect. "No sooner are they pronounced, than the past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial places of the memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the sentence, substitute one synonym for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying 'Open Wheat,' 'Open Barley,' to the door which obeyed no sound but 'Open Sesame.'"

The force and significance which Milton can infuse into the simplest word are strikingly shown in his description of the largest of land animals, in "Paradise Lost." In a single line the unwieldy monster is so represented as coming from the ground, that we almost involuntarily start aside from fear of being crushed by the living mass:--

"Behemoth, the biggest born of earth, upheaved His vastness."

Note, again, that passage in which Death at hell-gates threatens the Arch-Fiend, Satan:--

"Back to thy punishment, False fugitive! and to thy speed add wings, Lest with a whip of scorpions I pursue Thy lingering,--or, with one stroke of this dart, Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before!"

It is this necromantic power over language,--this skill in striking "the electric chain with which we are darkly bound," till its vibrations thrill along the chords of the heart, and its echoes ring in all the secret chambers of the soul,--which blinds us to the absurdities of "Paradise Lost." While following this mighty magician of language through

we overlook the incongruity with which he makes angels fight with "villanous saltpetre" and divinities talk Calvinism, puts the subtleties of Greek syntax into the mouth of Eve, and exhibits the Omnipotent Father arguing like a school divine. As with Milton, so with his great predecessor, Dante. Wondrous as is his power of creating pictures in a few lines, he owes it mainly to the directness, simplicity, and intensity of his language. In him "the invisible becomes visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence describes a character; a word acts as a flash of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighborhood where a tower is standing, with dreadful faces at the window."

The difference in the use of words by different writers is as great as that in the use of paints by great and poor artists; and there is as great a difference in the effect upon the understanding and the sensibilities of their readers. Who that is familiar with Bacon's writings can ever fail to recognize one of his sentences, so dense with pith, and going to the mark as if from a gun? In him, it has been remarked, language was always the flexible and obedient instrument of the thought; not, as in the productions of a lower order of mind, its rebellious and recalcitrant slave.

How much is the magic of Tennyson's verse due to "the fitting of aptest words to things," which we find on every page of his poetry! He has not only the vision, but the faculty divine, and no secret of his art is hid from him. Foot and pause, rhyme and rhythm, alliteration; subtle, penetrative words that touch the very quick of the truth; cunning words that have a spell in them for the memory and the imagination; old words, with their weird influence,

"Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years,"

and words used for the occasion in their primary sense, are all his ministers, and obedient to his will. An American writer, Mr. E. C. Stedman, in speaking of Swinburne's marvellous gift of melody, asks: "Who taught him all the hidden springs of melody? He was born a tamer of words, a subduer of this most stubborn, yet most copious of the literary tongues. In his poetry we discover qualities we did not know were in the language--a softness that seemed Italian, a rugged strength we thought was German, a blithe and debonair lightness we despaired of capturing from the French. He has added a score of new stops and pedals to the instrument. He has introduced, partly from other tongues, stanzaic forms, measures and effects untried before, and has brought out the swiftness and force of metres like the anapestic, carrying each to perfection at a single trial. Words in his hands are like the ivory balls of a juggler, and all words seem to be in his hands."

Words, with such men, are "nimble and airy servitors," not masters, and from the exquisite skill with which they are chosen, and the firmness with which they are knit together, are sometimes "half battles, stronger than most men's deeds." What is the secret of the weird-like power of De Quincey? Is it not that, of all late English writers, he has the most imperial dominion over the resources of expression; that he has weighed, as in a hair-balance, the precise significance of every word he uses; that he has conquered so completely the stubbornness of our vernacular as to render it a willing slave to all the whims and caprices, the ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic variations of his thought? Turn to whatever page you will of his writings, and it is not the thorough grasp of his subject, the enormous erudition, the extraordinary breadth and piercing acuteness of intellect which he displays, that excite your greatest surprise; but you feel that here is a man who has gauged the potentiality of every word he uses, who has analyzed the simples of his every compound phrase. In his hands our stiff Saxon language becomes almost as ductile as the Greek. Ideas that seem to defy expression,--ideas so subtile, or so vague and shifting, that most thinkers find it difficult to contemplate them at all,--are conveyed on his page with a nicety, a felicity of phrase, that might almost provoke the envy of Shakespeare. In the hands of a great sculptor marble and bronze become as soft and elastic as living flesh, and not unlike this is the dominion which the great writers possess over language. In their verse our rugged but pithy and expressive English breathes all sounds, all melodies;

"And now 'tis like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute, And now it is an angel's song, That makes the heavens be mute."

The superiority of the writers of the seventeenth century to those of our own day is due not less to their choice and collocation of words than to their weight of thought. There was no writing public nor reading populace in that age; the writers were few and intellectual, and they addressed themselves to learned, or, at least, to studious and thoughtful readers. "The structure of their language," says Henry Taylor, "is itself an evidence that they counted upon another frame of mind, and a different pace and speed in reading, from that which can alone be looked to by the writers of these days. Their books were not written to be snatched up, run through, talked over, and forgotten; and their diction, therefore, was not such as lent wings to haste and impatience, making everything so clear that he who ran or flew might read. Rather was it so constructed as to detain the reader over what was pregnant and profound, and compel him to that brooding and prolific posture of mind by which, if he had wings, they might help him to some more genial and profitable employment than that of running like an ostrich through a desert. And hence those characteristics of diction by which these writers are made more fit than those who have followed them to train the ear and utterance of a poet. For if we look at the long-suspended sentences of those days, with all their convolutions and intertextures,--the many parts waiting for the ultimate wholeness,--we shall perceive that without distinctive movement and rhythmical significance of a very high order, it would be impossible that they could be sustained in any sort of clearness. One of these writers' sentences is often in itself a work of art, having its strophes and antistrophes, its winding changes and recalls, by which the reader, though conscious of plural voices and running divisions of thought, is not, however, permitted to dissociate them from their mutual concert and dependency, but required, on the contrary, to give them entrance into his mind, opening it wide enough for the purpose, as one compacted and harmonious fabric. Sentences thus elaborately constructed, and complex, though musical, are not easy to a remiss reader, but they are clear and delightful to an intent reader."

Let no one, then, underrate the importance of the study of words. Daniel Webster was often seen absorbed in the study of an English dictionary. Lord Chatham read the folio dictionary of Bailey twice through, examining each word attentively, dwelling on its peculiar import and modes of construction, and thus endeavoring to bring the whole range of our language completely under his control. One of the most distinguished American authors is said to be in the habit of reading the dictionary through about once a year. His choice of fresh and forceful terms has provoked at times the charge of pedantry; but, in fact, he has but fearlessly used the wealth of the language that lies buried in the pages of Noah Webster. It is only by thus working in the mines of language that one can fill his storehouses of expression, so as to be above the necessity of using cheap and common words, or even using these with no subtle discrimination of their meanings. William Pinkney, the great American advocate, studied the English language profoundly, not so much to acquaint himself with the nice distinctions of its philosophical terms, as to acquire copiousness, variety, and splendor of expression. He studied the dictionary, page after page, content with nothing less than a mastery of the whole language, as a body of expression, in its primitive and derivative stock. Rufus Choate once said to one of his students; "You don't want a diction gathered from the newspapers, caught from the air, common and unsuggestive; but you want one whose every word is full-freighted with suggestion and association, with beauty and power." The leading languages of the world are full of such words, "opulent, microcosmic, in which histories are imaged, which record civilizations. Others recall to us great passages of eloquence, or of noble poetry, and bring in their train the whole splendor of such passages, when they are uttered."

Mr. Disraeli says of Canning, that he had at command the largest possible number of terms, both "rich and rare,"--words most vivid and effective,--really spirit-stirring words; for words there are, as every poet knows, whose sound is an echo to the sense,--words which, while by their literal meaning they convey an idea to the mind, have also a sound and an association which are like music to the ear, and a picture to the eye,--vivid, graphic, and picturesque words, that make you almost see the thing described. It is said of Keats, that when reading Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, he became a critic of their thoughts, their words, their rhymes, and their cadences. He brooded over fine phrases like a lover; and often, when he met a quaint or delicious word in the course of his reading, he would take pains to make it his own by using it, as speedily as possible, in some poem he was writing. Upon expressions like "the sea-shouldering whale" of Spenser, he would dwell with an ecstasy of delight. It is said of Theophile Gautier, whose language is remarkable for its copiousness and splendor, that he enriched his picturesque vocabulary from the most recondite sources, and that his favorite reading was the dictionary. He loved words for themselves, their look, their aroma, their color, and kept a supply of them constantly on hand, which he introduced at effective points.

The question has been often discussed whether, if man were deprived of articulate speech, he would still be able to think, and to express his thought. The example of the deaf and dumb, who evidently think, not by associations of sound, but of touch,--using combinations of finger-speech, instead of words, as the symbols of their thought,--appears to show that he might find a partial substitute for his present means of reflection. The telegraph and railway signals are, in fact, new modes of speech, which are quickly familiarized by practice. The engine driver shuts off the steam at the warning signal, without thinking of the words to which it is equivalent; a particular signal becomes associated with a particular act, and the interposition of words becomes useless. It is well known that persons skilled in gesticulation can communicate by it a long series of facts and even complicated trains of thought. Roscius, the Roman actor, claimed that he could express a sentiment in a greater variety of ways by significant gestures than Cicero could by language. During the reign of Augustus, both tragedies and comedies were acted, with powerful effect, by pantomime alone. When the Megarians wanted help from the Spartans, and threw down an empty meal-bag before the assembly, declaring that "it lacked meal," these verbal economists said that "the mention of the sack was superfluous." When the Scythian ambassadors wished to convince Darius of the hopelessness of invading their country, they made no long harangue, but argued with far more cogency by merely bringing him a bird, a mouse, a frog, and two arrows, to imply that unless he could soar like a bird, burrow like a mouse, and hide in the marshes like a frog, he would never be able to escape their shafts. Every one has heard of the Englishman in China, who, wishing to know the contents of a dish which lay before him, asked "Quack, quack?" and received in reply the words "Bow-wow." The language of gesture is so well understood in Italy that it is said that when King Ferdinand returned to Naples after the revolutionary movements of 1822, he made an address to the lazzaroni from the balcony of the palace, wholly by signs; and though made amidst the most tumultuous shouts, they were perfectly intelligible to the assemblage. It is traditionally affirmed that the famous conspiracy of the Sicilian Vespers was organized wholly by facial signs, not even the hand being employed. Energetic and faithful, however, as gesture is as a means of expression, it is in the domain of feeling and persuasion, and for embellishing and enforcing our ordinary language, that it is chiefly useful. The conventionality of language, which can be parroted where there is little thought or feeling, deprives it in many cases of its force; and it is a common remark that a look, a tone, or a gesture is often more eloquent than the most elaborate speech. But it is only the most general facts of a situation that gesture can express; it is incapable of distinguishing or decomposing them, and utterly fails to express the delicate shades of difference of which verbal expression is capable. Natural expression, from the cry and groan, and laugh and smile, up to the most delicate variations of tone and feature which the elocutionist uses, is emotional, subjective, and cannot convey an intellectual conception, a judgment, or a cognition.

Facts like these tend to show that man might still have been, as the root of the word "man" implies in Sanskrit, "a thinking being," though he had never been a "speech-dividing" being; but it is evident that his range of thought would have been exceedingly narrow, and that his mightiest triumphs over nature would have been impossible. While it may be true, as Tennyson says, that

"Thought leapt out to wed with thought, Ere thought could wed itself to speech,"

"Arma virumque cano, Trojae qui primus ab oris."

It is this cunning choice, along with the skilful arrangement of words, that, even more than the thought, eternizes the name of an author. Style is, and ever has been, the most vital element of literary immortalities. More than any other quality it is a writer's own property; and no one, not time itself, can rob him of it, or even diminish its value. Facts may be forgotten, learning grow commonplace, startling truths dwindle into mere truisms; but a grand or beautiful style can never lose its freshness or its charm. For his gorgeous style, even more than for his colossal erudition, is Gibbon admired; it is "the ordered march of his lordly prose" that is the secret of Macaulay's charm; and it is the unstudied grace of Hume's periods which renders him, in spite of his imperfect learning, in spite of his wilful perversions of truth, in spite of his infidelity and his toryism, the popular historian of England.

It has been truly said by a brilliant New England writer that this mystery of style,--why it is, that when one man writes a fact, it is cold or commonplace, and when another man writes it, in a little different, but equivalent phraseology, it is a rifle-shot or a revelation,--has never been sounded. "One can understand a little how the wink or twinkle of an eye, how an attitude, how a gesture, how a cadence or impassioned sweep of voice, should make a boundless distance between truths stated or declaimed. But how words, locked up in forms, still and stiff in sentences, contrive to tip a wink, how a proposition will insinuate more scepticism than it states, how a paragraph will drip with the honey of love, how a phrase will trail an infinite suggestion, how a page can be so serene or so gusty, so gorgeous or so pallid, so sultry or so cool, as to lap you in one intellectual climate or its opposite,--who has fathomed yet this wonder?"

From all this it will be seen how absurd it is to suppose that one can adequately enjoy the masterpieces of literature by means of translations. Among the arguments against the study of the dead languages, none is more pertinaciously urged by the educational red republicans of the day than this,--that the study is useless, because all the great works, the masterpieces of antiquity, have been translated. The man, we are told, who cannot enjoy Carlyle's version of Wilhelm Meister, Melmoth's Cicero, Morris's Virgil, Martin's Horace, or Carter's Epictetus, must be either a prodigious scholar or a prodigious dunce. Sometimes, it is urged, a translator even improves upon the original, as did Coleridge, in the opinion of many, upon Schiller's "Wallenstein." All this seems plausible enough, but the Greek and Latin scholar knows it to be fallacious and false. He knows that the finest passages in an author,--the exquisite thoughts, the curious verbal felicities,--are precisely those which defy reproduction in another tongue. The most masterly translations of them are no more like the original than a walking-stick is like a tree in full bloom. The quintessence of a writer,--the life and spirit,--all that is idiomatic, peculiar, or characteristic,--all that is Homerian in Homer, or Horatian in Horace,--evaporates in a translation.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet