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

connexion. There is indeed no true connexion at all between the two. In old texts this Gulf is generally called Sinus Gallicus; in the fourteenth century a few writers began to call it Sinus Leonis, the Gulf of the Lion, possibly from the fierceness of its winds and waves, but at any rate by a name having nothing to do with Lyons on the Rhone. The oak, in Greek [Greek: drys], plays no inconsiderable part in the Ritual of the Druids; it is not therefore wonderful if most students at one time of their lives have put the two in etymological relation. The Greeks, who with so characteristic a vanity assumed that the key to the meaning of words in all languages was to be found in their own, did this of course. So, too, there have not been wanting those who have traced in the name 'Jove' a heathen reminiscence of the awful name of Jehovah; while yet, however specious this may seem, on closer scrutiny the words declare that they have no connexion with one another, any more than 'Iapetus' and 'Japheth,' or, I may add, than 'God' and 'good,' which yet by an honourable moral instinct men can hardly refrain from putting into an etymological relation with each other.

Sometimes a falsely-assumed derivation of a word has reacted upon and modified its spelling. Thus it may have been with 'hurricane.' In the tearing up and hurrying away of the canes in the sugar plantations by this West-Indian tornado, many have seen an explanation of the name; just in the same way as the Latin 'calamitas' has been derived from 'calamus,' the stalk of the corn. In both cases the etymology is faulty; 'hurricane,' originally a Carib word, is only a transplanting into our tongue of the Spanish 'huracan.'

It is a signal evidence of the conservative powers of language, that we may continually trace in speech the record of customs and states of society which have now passed so entirely away as to survive in these words alone. For example, a 'stipulation' or agreement is so called, as many affirm, from 'stipula,' a straw; and tells of a Roman custom, that when two persons would make a mutual engagement with one another, [Footnote: See on this disputed point, and on the relation between the Latin 'stipulatio' and the old German custom not altogether dissimilar, J. Grimm, Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer, pp. 121, sqq. [This account of the derivation of 'stipulatio' is generally given up now; for Greek cognates of the word see Curtius, Greek Etymology, No. 224.]] they would break a straw between them. We all know what fact of English history is laid up in 'curfew,' or 'couvre-feu.' The 'limner,' or 'illuminer,' for so we find the word in Fuller, throws us back on a time when the illumination of manuscripts was a leading occupation of the painter. By 'lumber,' we are reminded that Lombards were the first pawnbrokers, even as they were the first bankers, in England: a 'lumber'-room being a 'lombard'-room, or a room where the pawnbroker stored his pledges. [Footnote: See my Select Glossary, s. v. Lumber.] Nor need I do more than remind you that in our common phrase of 'signing our name,' we preserve a record of a time when such first rudiments of education as the power of writing, were the portion of so few, that it was not as now an exception, but the custom, of most persons to make their mark or 'sign'; great barons and kings themselves not being ashamed to set this sign or cross to the weightiest documents. To 'subscribe' the name would more accurately express what now we do. As often as we term arithmetic the science of calculation, we implicitly allude to that rudimental stage in this science, when pebbles (calculi) were used, as now among savage tribes they often are, to help the practice of counting; the Greeks made the same use of one word of theirs ([Greek: psephizein]); while in another ([Greek: pempazein]) they kept record of a period when the five fingers were so employed. 'Expend,' 'expense,' tell us that money was once weighed out (Gen. xxiii. 16), not counted out as now; 'pecunia,' 'peculatus,' 'fee' (vieh) keep record all of a time when cattle were the main circulating medium. In 'library' we preserve the fact that books were once written on the bark (liber) of trees; in 'volume' that they were mostly rolls; in 'paper,' that the Egyptian papyrus, 'the paper-reeds by the brooks,' furnished at one time the ordinary material on which they were written.

Names thus so often surviving things, we have no right to turn an etymology into an argument. There was a notable attempt to do this in the controversy so earnestly carried on between the Greek and Latin Churches, concerning the bread, whether it should be leavened or unleavened, that was used at the Table of the Lord. Those of the Eastern Church constantly urged that the Greek word for bread (and in Greek was the authoritative record of the first institution of this sacrament), implied, according to its root, that which was raised or lifted up; not, therefore, to use a modern term, 'sad' or set, or, in other words, unleavened bread; such rather as had undergone the process of fermentation. But even if the etymology on which they relied (artos from airo, to raise) had been as certain as it is questionable, they could draw no argument of the slightest worth from so remote an etymology, and one which had so long fallen out of the consciousness of those who employed the word.

Theories too, which long since were utterly renounced, have yet left their traces behind them. Thus 'good humour.' 'bad humour.' 'humours,' and, strangest contradiction of all, 'dry humour,' rest altogether on a now exploded, but a very old and widely accepted, theory of medicine; according to which there were four principal moistures or 'humours' in the natural body, on the due proportion and combination of which the disposition alike of body and mind depended. [Footnote: See the Prologue to Ben Jonson's Every Man out of His Humour.] Our present use of 'temper' has its origin in the same theory; the due admixture, or right tempering, of these humours gave what was called the happy temper, or mixture, which, thus existing inwardly, manifested itself also outwardly; while 'distemper,' which we still employ in the sense of sickness, was that evil frame either of a man's body or his mind (for it was used of both), which had its rise in an unsuitable mingling of these humours. In these instances, as in many more, the great streams of thought and feeling have changed their course, flowing now in quite other channels from those which once they filled, but have left these words as abiding memorials of the channels wherein once they ran. Thus 'extremes,' 'golden mean,' 'category,' 'predicament,' 'axiom,' 'habit'—what are these but a deposit in our ethical terminology which Aristotle has left behind him?

But we have not exhausted our examples of the way in which the record of old errors, themselves dismissed long ago, will yet survive in language—being bound up in words that grew into use when those errors found credit, and that maintain their currency still. The mythology which Saxon or Dane brought with them from their German or Scandinavian homes is as much extinct for us as are the Lares, Larvae, and Lemures of heathen Rome; yet the deposit it has permanently left behind it in the English language is not inconsiderable. 'Lubber,' 'dwarf,' 'oaf,' 'droll,' 'wight,' 'puck,' 'urchin,' 'hag,' 'night-mare,' 'gramary,' 'Old Nick,' 'changeling' (wechselkind), suggest themselves, as all bequeathed to us by that old Teutonic demonology. [Footnote: [But the words puck, urchin, gramary, are not of Teutonic origin. The etymology of puck is unknown; urchin means properly 'a hedgehog,' being the old French eriçon (in modern French hérisson), a derivative from the Latin ericius, 'a hedgehog'; gramary is simply Old French gramaire, 'grammar' = Lat. grammatica (ars), just as Old French mire, 'a medical man' = Lat. medicum.]] Few now have any faith in astrology, or count that the planet under which a man is born will affect his temperament, make him for life of a disposition grave or gay, lively or severe. Yet our language affirms as much; for we speak of men as 'jovial' or 'saturnine,' or 'mercurial'—'jovial,' as being born under the planet Jupiter or Jove, which was the joyfullest star, and of happiest augury of all: [Footnote: 'Jovial' in Shakespeare's time (see Cymbeline, act 5, sc. 4) had not forgotten its connexion with Jove.] a gloomy severe person is said to be 'saturnine,' born, that is, under the planet Saturn, who makes those that own his influence, having been born when he was in the ascendant, grave and stern as himself: another we call 'mercurial,' or light- hearted, as those born under the planet Mercury were accounted to be. The same faith in the influence of the stars survives in 'disastrous,' 'ill-starred,' 'ascendancy,' 'lord of the ascendant,' and, indeed, in 'influence' itself. What a record of old speculations, old certainly as Aristotle, and not yet exploded in the time of Milton, [Footnote: See Paradise Lost, iii. 714-719.] does the word 'quintessence' contain; and 'arsenic' the same; no other namely than this that metals are of different sexes, some male ([Greek: arsenika]), and some female. Again, what curious legends belong to the 'sardonic' [Footnote: See an excellent history of this word, in Rost and Palm's Greek Lexicon, s. v. [Greek: sardonios].] or Sardinian, laugh; a laugh caused, as was supposed, by a plant growing in Sardinia, of which they who ate, died laughing; to the 'barnacle' goose, [Footnote: For a full and most interesting study on this very curious legend, see Max Müller's Lectures on Language, vol. ii. pp. 533-551; [for the etymology of the word barnacle in this connexion see the New English Dictionary (s. v.).]] to the 'amethyst' esteemed, as the word implies, a preventive or antidote of drunkenness; and to other words not a few, which are employed by us still.

A question presents itself here, and one not merely speculative; for it has before now become a veritable case of conscience with some whether they ought to use words which originally rested on, and so seem still to affirm, some superstition or untruth. This question has practically settled itself; the words will keep their ground: but further, they have a right to do this; for no word need be considered so to root itself in its etymology, and to draw its sap and strength from thence, that it cannot detach itself from this, and acquire the rights of an independent existence. And thus our weekly newspapers commit no absurdity in calling themselves 'journals,' or 'diurnals'; and we as little when we name that a 'journey' which occupies not one, but several days. We involve ourselves in no real contradiction, speaking of a 'quarantine' of five, ten, or any number of days more or fewer than forty; or of a population 'decimated' by a plague, though exactly a tenth of it has not perished. A stone coffin may be still a 'sarcophagus,' without thereby implying that it has any special property of consuming the flesh of bodies which are laid within it. [Footnote: See Pliny, H. N. ii. 96; xxxvi. 17.] In like manner the wax of our 'candles' ('candela,' from 'candeo') is not necessarily white; our 'rubrics' retain their name, though seldom printed in red ink; neither need our 'miniatures' abandon theirs, though no longer painted with minium or carmine; our 'surplice' is not usually worn over an undergarment of skins; our 'stirrups' are not ropes by whose aid we climb upon our horses; nor are 'haversacks' sacks for the carrying of oats; it is not barley or bere only which we store up in our 'barns,' nor hogs' fat in our 'larders'; a monody need not be sung by a single voice; and our lucubrations are not always by candlelight; a 'costermonger' or 'costardmonger' does not of necessity sell costards or apples; there are 'palaces' which are not built on the Palatine Hill; and 'nausea' [Footnote: [From nausea through the French comes our English noise; see Bartsch and Horning, Section 90.]] which is not sea-sickness. I remember once asking a class of school-children, whether an announcement which during one very hard winter appeared in the papers, of a 'white _black_bird' having been shot, might be possibly correct, or was on the face of it self-contradictory and absurd. The less thoughtful members of the class instantly pronounced against it; while after a little consideration, two or three made answer that it might very well be, that, while without doubt the bird had originally obtained this name from its blackness, yet 'blackbird' was now the name of a species, and a name so cleaving to it, as not to be forfeited, even when the blackness had quite disappeared. We do not question the right of the 'New Forest' to retain this title of New, though