On the Study of Words by Richard Chenevix Trench (primary phonics txt) 📗

no hurt; this use of 'innocent' assuming that to do hurt and harm is the chief employment to which men turn their intellectual powers, that, where they are wise, they are oftenest wise to do evil.

Nor are these isolated examples of the contemptuous use which words expressive of goodness gradually acquire. Such meet us on every side. Our 'silly' is the Old-English 'saelig' or blessed. We see it in a transition state in our early poets, with whom 'silly' is an affectionate epithet which sheep obtain for their harmlessness. One among our earliest calls the newborn Lord of Glory Himself, 'this harmless silly babe,' But 'silly' has travelled on the same lines as 'simple,' 'innocent,' and so many other words. The same moral phenomenon repeats itself continually. Thus 'sheepish' in the Ormulum is an epithet of honour: it is used of one who has the mind of Him who was led as a sheep to the slaughter. At the first promulgation of the Christian faith, while the name of its Divine Founder was still strange to the ears of the heathen, they were wont, some in ignorance, but more of malice, slightly to mispronounce this name, turning 'Christus' into 'Chrestus'—that is, the benevolent or benign. That these last meant no honour thereby to the Lord of Life, but the contrary, is certain; this word, like 'silly,' 'innocent,' 'simple,' having already contracted a slight tinge of contempt, without which there would have been no inducement to fasten it on the Saviour. The French have their 'bonhomie' with the same undertone of contempt, the Greeks their [Greek: eyetheia]. Lady Shiel tells us of the modern Persians, 'They have odd names for describing the moral qualities; "Sedakat" means sincerity, honesty, candour; but when a man is said to be possessed of "sedakat," the meaning is that he is a credulous, contemptible simpleton.' [Footnote: Life and Manners in Persia, p. 247.] It is to the honour of the Latin tongue, and very characteristic of the best aspects of Roman life, that 'simplex' and 'simplicitas' never acquired this abusive signification.

Again, how prone are we all to ascribe to chance or fortune those gifts and blessings which indeed come directly from God—to build altars to Fortune rather than to Him who is the author of every good thing which we have gotten. And this faith of men, that their blessings, even their highest, come to them by a blind chance, they have incorporated in a word; for 'happy' and 'happiness' are connected with 'hap,' which is chance;—how unworthy, then, to express any true felicity, whose very essence is that it excludes hap or chance, that the world neither gave nor can take it away. [Footnote: The heathen with their [Greek: eudaimonia], inadequate as this word must be allowed to be, put us here to shame.] Against a similar misuse of 'fortunate,' 'unfortunate,' Wordsworth very nobly protests, when, of one who, having lost everything else, had yet kept the truth, he exclaims:

     'Call not the royal Swede unfortunate,
      Who never did to Fortune bend the knee.'

There are words which reveal a wrong or insufficient estimate that men take of their duties, or that at all events others have taken before them; for it is possible that the mischief may have been done long ago, and those who now use the words may only have inherited it from others, not helped to bring it about themselves. An employer of labour advertises that he wants so many 'hands'; but this language never could have become current, a man could never have thus shrunk into a 'hand' in the eyes of his fellow-man, unless this latter had in good part forgotten that, annexed to those hands which he would purchase to toil for him, were also heads and hearts [Footnote: A similar use of [Greek: somata] for slaves in Greek rested originally on the same forgetfulness of the moral worth of every man. It has found its way into the Septuagint and Apocrypha (Gen. xxxvi. 6; 2 Macc. viii. 11; Tob. x. 10); and occurs once in the New Testament (Rev. xviii. 13). [In Gen. xxxvi. 6 the [Greek: somata] of the Septuagint is a rendering of the Hebrew nafshôth, souls, so Luther translates 'Seelen.']]—a fact, by the way, of which, if he persists in forgetting it, he may be reminded in very unwelcome ways at the last. In Scripture there is another not unfrequent putting of a part for the whole, as when it is said, 'The same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls' (Acts ii. 41). 'Hands' here, 'souls' there—the contrast may suggest some profitable reflections.

There is another way in which the immorality of words mainly displays itself, and in which they work their worst mischief; that is, when honourable names are given to dishonourable things, when sin is made plausible; arrayed, it may be, in the very colours of goodness, or, if not so, yet in such as go far to conceal its own native deformity. 'The tongue,' as St. James has said, 'is a world of iniquity' (iii. 7); or, as some would render his words, and they are then still more to our purpose, 'the ornament of iniquity,' that which sets it out in fair and attractive colours.

How much wholesomer on all accounts is it that there should be an ugly word for an ugly thing, one involving moral condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of a little coarseness, rather than one which plays fast and loose with the eternal principles of morality, makes sin plausible, and shifts the divinely reared landmarks of right and wrong, thus bringing the user of it under the woe of them 'that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter' (Isai. v. 20). On this text, and with reference to this scheme, South has written four of his grandest sermons, bearing this striking title, Of the fatal Imposture and Force of Words. [Footnote: Sermons, 1737, vol. ii. pp. 313-351; vol. vi. pp. 3-120. Thus on those who pleaded that their 'honour' was engaged, and that therefore they could not go back from this or that sinful act:—'Honour is indeed a noble thing, and therefore the word which signifies it must needs be very plausible. But as a rich and glistening garment may be cast over a rotten body, so an illustrious commanding word may be put upon a vile and an ugly thing—for words are but the garments, the loose garments of things, and so may easily be put off and on according to the humour of him who bestows them. But the body changes not, though the garments do.'] How awful, yea how fearful, is this 'imposture and force' of theirs, leading men captive at will. There is an atmosphere about them which they are evermore diffusing, a savour of life or of death, which we insensibly inhale at each moral breath we draw. [Footnote: Bacon's words have often been quoted, but they will bear being quoted once more: Credunt enim homines rationem suam verbis imperare. Sed fit etiam ut verba vim suam super intellectum retorqueant et reflectant.] 'Winds of the soul,' as we have already heard them called, they fill its sails, and are continually impelling it upon its course, to heaven or to hell.

Thus how different the light in which we shall have learned to regard a sin, according as we have been wont to designate it, and to hear it designated, by a word which brings out its loathsomeness and deformity; or by one which palliates this and conceals; men, as one said of old, being wont for the most part to be ashamed not of base deeds but of base names affixed to those deeds. In the murder trials at Dublin, 1883, those destined to the assassin's knife were spoken of by approvers as persons to be removed, and their death constantly described as their 'removal.' In Sussex it is never said of a man that he is drunk. He may be 'tight,' or 'primed,' or 'crank,' or 'concerned in liquor,' nay, it may even be admitted that he had taken as much liquor as was good for him; but that he was drunk, oh never. [Footnote: 'Pransus' and 'potus,' in like manner, as every Latin scholar knows, mean much more than they say.] Fair words for foul things are everywhere only too frequent; thus in 'drug-damned Italy,' when poisoning was the rifest, nobody was said to be poisoned; it was only that the death of this one or of that had been 'assisted' (aiutata). Worse still are words which seek to turn the edge of the divine threatenings against some sin by a jest; as when in France a subtle poison, by whose aid impatient heirs delivered themselves from those who stood between them and the inheritance which they coveted, was called 'poudre de succession.' We might suppose beforehand that such cloaks for sin would be only found among people in an advanced state of artificial cultivation. But it is not so. Captain Erskine, who visited the Fiji Islands before England had taken them into her keeping, and who gives some extraordinary details of the extent to which cannibalism then prevailed among their inhabitants, pork and human flesh being their two staple articles of food, relates in his deeply interesting record of his voyage that natural pig they called 'short pig,' and man dressed and prepared for food, 'long pig.' There was doubtless an attempt here to carry off with a jest the revolting character of the practice in which they indulged. For that they were themselves aware of this, that their consciences did bear witness against it, was attested by their uniform desire to conceal, if possible, all traces of the practice from European eyes.

But worst, perhaps, of all are names which throw a flimsy veil of sentiment over some sin. What a source, for example, of mischief without end in our country parishes is the one practice of calling a child born out of wedlock a 'love-child,' instead of a bastard. It would be hard to estimate how much it has lowered the tone and standard of morality among us; or for how many young women it may have helped to make the downward way more sloping still. How vigorously ought we to oppose ourselves to all such immoralities of language. This opposition, it is true, will never be easy or pleasant; for many who will endure to commit a sin, will profoundly resent having that sin called by its right name. Pirates, as Aristotle tells us, in his time called themselves 'purveyors.' [Footnote: Rhet. iii. 2: [Greek: oi laestai autous poriotas kalousi nun.]] Buccaneers, men of the same bloody trade, were by their own account 'brethren of the coast.' Shakespeare's thieves are only true to human nature, when they name themselves 'St. Nicholas' clerks,' 'michers,' 'nuthooks,' 'minions of the moon,' anything in short but thieves; when they claim for their stealing that it shall not be so named, but only conveying ('convey the wise it call'); the same dislike to look an ugly fact in the face reappearing among the voters in some of our corrupter boroughs, who receive, not bribes—they are hugely indignant if this is imputed to them—but 'head-money' for their votes. Shakespeare indeed has said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; but there are some things which are not roses, and which are counted to smell a great deal sweeter being called by any other name than their own. Thus, to deal again with bribes, call a bribe 'palm oil,' or a 'pot de vin,' and how much of its ugliness disappears. Far more moral words are the English 'sharper' and 'blackleg' than the French 'chevalier d'industrie': [Footnote: For the rise of this phrase, see Lemontey, Louis XIV. p. 43.] and the same holds good of the English equivalent, coarse as it is, for the Latin 'conciliatrix.' In this last word we have a notable example of the putting of sweet for bitter, of the attempt to present a disgraceful occupation on an amiable, almost a sentimental side, rather than in its own proper deformity. [Footnote: This tendency of men to throw the mantle of an honourable word over a dishonourable thing, or, vice versa, to degrade an honourable thing, when they do not love it, by a dishonourable appellation, has in Greek a word to describe it, [Greek: hypokorizesthai], itself a word with an interesting history; while the great ethical teachers of Greece frequently occupy themselves in detecting and denouncing this most mischievous among all the impostures of words. Thus, when Thucydides (iii. 82) would paint the fearful moral ruin which her great Civil War had wrought, he adduces this alteration of the received value of words, this fitting of false names to everything—names of honour to the base, and of baseness to the honourable—as one of the most