Chapter 2

‘spinner’ and ‘spinster’ are _both_ referred to the male sex, and the barbarous ‘spinstress’ invented for the female.

{175} I have included ‘huckster’, as will be observed, in this list. I certainly cannot produce any passage in which it is employed as the _female_ pedlar. We have only, however, to keep in mind the existence of the verb ‘to huck’, in the sense of to peddle (it is used by Bishop Andrews), and at the same time not to let the present spelling of ‘hawker’ mislead us, and we shall confidently recognize ‘hucker’ (the German ‘höker’ or ‘höcker’), in hawker, that is, the _man_ who ‘hucks’, ‘hawks’, or peddles, as in ‘huckster’ the _female_ who does the same. When therefore Howell and others employ ‘hucksteress’, they fall into the same barbarous excess of expression, whereof we are all guilty, when we use ‘seamstress’ and ‘songstress’.--The note stood thus in the third edition. Since that was published, I have met in the _Nominale_ referred to p. 155, the following, “hæc auxiatrix, a _hukster_”. [Huckster, xiii. cent. _huccster_, it may be noted is an older word in the language than _hukker_ (hucker) and _to huck_, both first appearing in the xiv. cent. N.E.D.]

{176} [Preserved in the surnames Baxter and Brewster. See C. W. Bardsley, _English Surnames_, 2nd ed. 364, 379.]

{177} _Notes and Queries_, No. 157.

{178} [‘Welkin’ is possibly a plural, but in Anglo-Saxon _wolcen_ is a cloud, and the plural _wolcnu_.]

{179} When Wallis wrote, it was only beginning to be forgotten that ‘chick’ was the singular, and ‘chicken’ the plural: “_Sunt qui dicunt_ in singulari ‘chicken’, et in plurali ‘chickens’”; and even now the words are in many country parts correctly employed. In Sussex, a correspondent writes, they would as soon think of saying ‘oxens’ as ‘chickens’. [‘Chicken’ is properly a singular, old English _cicen_, the _-en_ being a diminutival, not a plural, suffix (as in ‘kitten’, ‘maiden’). Thus ‘chicken’ was originally ‘a little chuck’ (or cock), out of which ‘chick’ was afterwards developed.]

{180} See Chaucer’s _Romaunt of the Rose_, 1032, where Richesse, “an high lady of great noblesse”, is one of the persons of the allegory; and compare Rev. xviii. 17, Authorized Version. This has so entirely escaped the knowledge of Ben Jonson, English scholar as he was, that in his _Grammar_ he cites ‘riches’ as an example of an English word wanting a singular.

{181} “Set shallow brooks to surging seas, An orient pearl to a white _pease_”.

_Puttenham._

{182} [‘Eaves’ (old English _efes_) from which an imaginary singular ‘eave’ has sometimes been evolved, as when Tennyson speaks of a ‘cottage-eave’ (_In Memoriam_, civ.), and Cotgrave of ‘an house-eave’.]

{183} It is curious that despite of this protest, one of his plays has for its name, _Sejanus his Fall_.

{184} Even this does not startle Addison, or cause him any misgiving; on the contrary he boldly asserts (_Spectator_, No. 135), “The same single letter ‘s’ on many occasions does the office of a whole word, and represents the ‘his’ _or ‘her’_ of our forefathers”.

{185} Nothing can be better than the way in which Wallis disposes of this scheme, although less successful in showing what this ‘s’ does mean than in showing what it cannot mean (_Gramm. Ling. Anglic._, c. 5); Qui autem arbitrantur illud s, loco _his_ adjunctum esse (priori scilicet parte per aphæresim abscissâ), ideoque apostrophi notam semper vel pingendam esse, vel saltem subintelligendam, omnino errant. Quamvis enim non negem quin apostrophi nota commode nonnunquam affigi possit, ut ipsius litteræ s usus distinctius, ubi opus est, percipiatur; ita tamen semper fieri debere, aut etiam ideo fieri quia vocem _his_ innuat, omnino nego. Adjungitur enim et fœminarum nominibus propriis, et substantivis pluralibus, ubi vox _his_ sine solœcismo locum habere non potest: atque etiam in possessivis _ours_, _yours_, _theirs_, _hers_, ubi vocem _his_ innui nemo somniaret.

{186} See the proofs in Marsh’s _Manual of the English Language_, English Edit., pp. 280, 293.

{187} I cannot think that it would exceed the authority of our University Presses, if this were removed from the Prayer Books which they put forth, as certainly it is supprest by many of the clergy in the reading. Such a liberty they have already assumed with the Bible. In all earlier editions of the Authorized Version it stood at 1 Kin. xv. 24: “Nevertheless _Asa his_ heart was perfect with the Lord”; it is “_Asa’s_ heart” now. In the same way “_Mordecai his_ matters” (Esth. iii. 4) has been silently changed into “_Mordecai’s_ matters”; and in some modern editions, but not in all, “_Holofernes his_ head” (Judith xiii. 9) into “_Holofernes’_ head”.

{188} In a good note on the matter, p. 6, in the _Comprehensive Grammar_ prefixed to his _Dictionary_, London, 1775.

{189} See Grimm. _Deut. Gramm._, vol. ii. pp. 609, 944.

{190} The existence of ‘stony’--‘lapidosus’, ‘steinig’, does not make ‘stonen’--‘lapideus’, ‘steinern’, superfluous, any more than ‘earthy’ makes ‘earthen’. That part of the field in which the good seed withered so quickly (Matt. xiii. 5) was ‘stony’. The vessels which held the water that Christ turned into wine (John iii. 6) were ‘stonen’.

{191} J. Grimm (_Deutsche Gramm._ vol. i, p. 1040): Dass die starke form die ältere, kräftigere, innere; die schwache die spätere, gehemmtere und mehr äusserliche sey, leuchtet ein. Elsewhere, speaking generally of inflections by internal vowel change, he characterizes them as a ‘chief beauty’ (hauptschönheit) of the Teutonic languages. Marsh (_Manual of the English Language_, p. 233, English ed.) protests, though, as it seems to me, on no sufficient grounds, against these terms ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, as themselves fanciful and inappropriate.

{192} The entire ignorance as to the past historic evolution of the language, with which some have undertaken to write about it, is curious. Thus the author of _Observations upon the English Language_, without date, but published about 1730, treats all these strong præterites as of recent introduction, counting ‘knew’ to have lately expelled ‘knowed’, ‘rose’ to have acted the same part toward ‘rised’, and of course esteeming them as so many barbarous violations of the laws of the language; and concluding with the warning that “great care must be taken to prevent their increase”!!--p. 24. Cobbett does not fall into this absurdity, yet proposes in his _English Grammar_, that they should all be abolished as inconvenient. [Now many others are rapidly becoming obsolescent. How seldom do we hear ‘drank’, ‘shrank’, ‘sprang’, ‘stank’.]

{193} J. Grimm (_Deutsche Gramm._ vol. i. p. 839): “Die starke flexion stufenweise versinkt und ausstirbt, die schwache aber um sich greift”. Cf. i. 994, 1040; ii. 5; iv. 509.

{194} [See also J. C. Hare, _Two Essays in Eng. Philology_ i. 47-56.]

{195} Thus Wallis (_Gramm. Ling. Anglic._, 1654): Singulari numero siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud esse solet, vel familiariter blandientis. [For a good discussion of the old use of ‘thou’, see the Hares, _Guesses at Truth_, 1847, pp. 169-90. Even at the present day a Wessex matron has been known to resent the too familiar address of an inferior with the words, “Who bist thou _a-theein’_ of”? (_The Spectator_, 1904, Sept. 3, p. 319).]

{196} What the actual position of the compellation ‘thou’ was at that time, we may perhaps best learn from this passage in Fuller’s _Church History, Dedication of Book_ vii.: “In opposition whereunto [i.e. to the Quaker usage] we maintain that _thou_ from superiors to inferiors is proper, as a sign of command; from equals to equals is passable, as a note of familiarity; but from inferiors to superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack of clownishness; if from affectation, a tone of contempt”.

{197} See on this subject of the dropping of grammatical gender, Pott, _Etymologische Forschungen_, part 2, pp. 404, _sqq._

IV

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.

{Sidenote: _Obsolete Words_}

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.

{Sidenote: _Miscreant_}

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.

{Sidenote: ‘_Influence_’}

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

“store of ladies, whose bright eyes Rain _influence_”,

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.

{Sidenote: ‘_Baffle_’}

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:

“And after all, for greater infamy He by the heels him hung upon a tree, And _baffled_ so, that all which passéd by The picture of his punishment might see”{203}.

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?

{Sidenote: ‘_Religion_’}

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.

{Sidenote: ‘_Worship_’}

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}.

{Sidenote: ‘_Treacle_’}

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:

“Offenders now, the chiefest, do begin To strive for grace, and expiate their sin: All winds blow fair that did the world embroil, _Your vipers treacle yield_, and scorpions oil”.

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.

{Sidenote: ‘_Blackguard_’}

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 useless 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.

{Sidenote: ‘_Duke_’, ‘_Corpse_’, ‘_Weed_’}

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.

{Sidenote: _Words used more accurately_}

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.

{Sidenote: _Words used less accurately_}

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.

{Sidenote: ‘_Idea_’}

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,

“how it showed, Answering his great _idea_”,

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.

* * * * *

{Sidenote: ‘_Bombast_’, ‘_Garble_’}

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:

“Thy body’s bolstered out with _bombast_ and with bags”.

‘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 exclusive 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.

{Sidenote: _Gradual Change of Meaning_}

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.

{Sidenote: ‘_Gossip_’}

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.

{Sidenote: ‘_Imp_’, ‘_Brat_’}

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,

“Ye sacred _imps_ that on Parnasso dwell”;

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,

“Oh Israel, oh household of the Lord, Oh Abraham’s _brats_, oh brood of blessed seed”?

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.

{Sidenote: ‘_Proser_’}

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

“And surely Nashe, though he a _proser_ were, A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear”;

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.

{Sidenote: ‘_Knave_’}

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 signification 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”.

{Sidenote: _Weakening of Words_}

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.

{Sidenote: _Changes of Meaning_}

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}

{198} [‘Frampold’, peevish, perverse (_Merry Wives of Windsor_, 1598, ii, 2, 94) is supposed to be another form of ‘from-polled’, as if ‘wrong-headed’. ‘Garboil’, a tumult or hubbub, was originally _garboyl_, and came from old French _garbouil_ (Italian _garbuglio_). ‘Brangle’, a brawl, stands for ‘brandle’ from Old Fr. _brandeler_, akin to ‘brandish’.]

{199} [‘Dutch’ i.e. Teutonic, Mid. High-German _diutsch_, old High-German _diut-isk_ from _diot_, people, and so the people-ish or popular language the mother-tongue, founded on a primitive _teuta_, ‘people’. See Kluge _s.v. Deutsch_.]

{200} So in Herrick’s _Electra_:

“More white than are the whitest creams, Or moonlight _tinselling_ the streams”.

{201} [Hence also the epidemic of malefic power supposed to be air-borne, ‘influenza’.]

{202} See Holinshed’s _Chronicles_, vol. iii, pp. 827, 1218; Ann. 1513, 1570.

{203} _Fairy Queen_, vi, 7, 27; cf. v. 3, 37.

{204} [The two words are intimately related, ‘king’, contracted for _kining_ (Anglo-Saxon _cyn-ing_), ‘son of the kin’ or ‘tribe’, one of the people, cognate with _cynde_, true-born, native, ‘kind’, and _cynd_, nature ‘kind’, whence ‘kindly’, natural.]

{205} See Sir W. Scott’s edition of Swift’s _Works_, vol. ix, p. 139.

{206} θηριακή, from θηρίον, a designation given to the viper, see Acts xxviii, 4. ‘Theriac’ is only the more rigid form of the same word, the scholarly, as distinguished from the popular, adoption of it. Augustine (_Con. duas Epp. Pelag._ iii, 7): Sicut fieri consuevit antidotum etiam de serpentibus contra venena serpentum.

{207} And Chaucer, more solemnly still:

“Christ, which that is to every harm _triacle_”.

The _antidotal_ character of treacle comes out yet more in these lines of Lydgate:

“There is no _venom_ so parlious in sharpnes, As whan it hath of _treacle_ a likenes”.

{208} “A slave that within these twenty years rode with the _black guard_ in the Duke’s carriage, ’mongst spits and dripping pans”. (Webster’s _White Devil_.) [First ed. 1612. “The Black Guard of the King’s Kitchen” is mentioned in a State Paper of 1535 (N.E.D.).]

{209} Génin (_Lexique de la Langue de Molière_, p. 367) says well: “En augmentant le nombre des mots, il a fallu restreindre leur signification, et faire aux nouveaux un apanage aux dépens des anciens”.

{210} [Accordingly there is nothing tautological in the “dead corpses” of 2 Kings xix, 35, in the A.V.]

{211} [‘Weed’, vegetable growth, Anglo-Saxon _weód_, is here confounded with a perfectly distinct word ‘weed’, clothing, which is the Anglo-Saxon _waéd_, a garment.]

{212} And no less so in French with ‘dame’, by which form not ‘domina’ only, but ‘dominus’, was represented. Thus in early French poetry, “_Dame_ Dieu” for “_Dominus_ Deus” continually occurs. We have here the key to the French exclamation, or oath, as we now perceive it to be, ‘Dame’! of which the dictionaries give no account. See Génin’s _Variations du Langage Français_, p. 347.

{213} [‘Hoyden’ seems to be derived from the old Dutch _heyden_, a heathen, then a clownish, boorish fellow.]

{214} [This “ancient Saxon phrase”, as Longfellow calls it, has not been found in any old English writer, but has been adopted from the Modern German. Neither is it known in the dialects, E.D.D.]

{215} “A _furlong_, quasi _furrowlong_, being so much as a team in England plougheth going forward, before they return back again”. (Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, p. 42.) [‘Furlong’ in St. Luke xxiv, 13, already occurs in the Anglo-Saxon version of that passage as _furlanga_.]

{216} [Recent etymologists cannot see any connexion between ‘peck’ and ‘poke’.]

{217} [e. g. “One said thus _preposterously_: ‘when we had climbed the clifs and were a shore’” (Puttenham, _Arte of Eng. Poesie_, 1589, p. 181, ed. Arber). “It is a _preposterous_ order to teach first and to learn after” (_Preface to Bible_, 1611). “Place not the coming of the wise men, _preposterously_, before the appearance of the star” (Abp. Secker, _Sermons_, iii, 85, ed. 1825).]

{218} Thus Barrow: “Which [courage and constancy] he that wanteth is no other than _equivocally_ a gentleman, as an image or a carcass is a man”.

{219} Phillips, _New World of Words_, 1706. [‘Garble’ comes through old French _garbeler_, _grabeler_ (Italian _garbellare_) from Latin _cribellare_, to sift, and that from _cribellum_, a sieve, diminutive of _cribrum_.]

{220} “But his [Gideon’s] army must be _garbled_, as too great for God to give victory thereby; all the fearful return home by proclamation” (Fuller, _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, b. ii, c. 8).

{221} [Compare the transitions of meaning in French _manant_ = (1) a dweller (where he was born--from _manoir_ to dwell), the inhabitant of a homestead, (2) a countryman, (3) a clown or boor, a coarse fellow.]

{222} [These words lie totally apart. ‘Brat’, an infant, seems a figurative use of ‘brat’, a rag or pinafore, just as ‘bantling’ comes from ‘band’, a swathe.]

{223} “We cannot always be contemplative, or _pragmatical_ abroad: but have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged soul may leave off awhile her severe schooling”. (Milton, _Tetrachordon_.)

{224} [Anglo-Saxon _cnafa_, or _cnapa_, a boy.]

{225} [Mr. Fitzedward Hall in 1873 says ‘antecedents’ is “not yet a generation old” (_Mod. English_, 303). Landor in 1853 says “the French have lately taught (it to) us” (_Last Fruit of an Old Tree_, 176). De Quincey, in 1854 calls it “modern slang” (_Works_ xiv, 449); and the earliest quotation, 1841, given in the N.E.D., introduces it as “what the French call their antecedents”.]

{226} See Whewell, _History of Moral Philosophy in England_, pp. xxvii.-xxxii.

{227} For a fuller treatment of the subject of this lecture, see my _Select Glossary of English Words used formerly in senses different from their present_, 2nd ed. London, 1859.

V

CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS

When I announce to you that the subject of my lecture to-day will be English orthography, or the spelling of the words in our native language, with the alterations which this has undergone, you may perhaps think with yourselves that a weightier, or, if not a weightier, at all events a more interesting subject might have occupied this our concluding lecture. I cannot admit it to be wanting either in importance or in interest. Unimportant it certainly is not, but might well engage, as it often has engaged, the attention of those with far higher acquirements than any which I possess. Uninteresting it may be, by faults in the manner of treating it; but I am sure it ought as little to be this; and would never prove so in competent hands{228}. Let us then address ourselves to this matter, not without good hope that it may yield us both profit and pleasure.

I know not who it was that said, “The invention of printing was very well; but, as compared to the invention of writing, it was no such great matter after all”. Whoever it was who made this observation, it is clear that for him use and familiarity had not obliterated the wonder which there is in that, whereat we probably have long ceased to wonder at all--the power, namely, of representing sounds by written signs, of reproducing for the eye that which existed at first only for the ear: nor was the estimate which he formed of the relative value of these two inventions other than a just one. Writing indeed stands more nearly on a level with speaking, and deserves rather to be compared with it, than with printing; which, with all its utility, is yet of altogether another and inferior type of greatness: or, if this is too much to claim for writing, it may at any rate be affirmed to stand midway between the other two, and to be as much superior to the one as it is inferior to the other.

The intention of the written word, that which presides at its first formation, the end whereunto it is a mean, is by aid of symbols agreed on beforehand, to represent to the eye with as much accuracy as possible the spoken word.

{Sidenote: _Imperfection of Writing_}

It never fulfils this intention completely, and by degrees more and more imperfectly. Short as man’s spoken word often falls of his thought, his written word falls often as short of his spoken. Several causes contribute to this. In the first place, the marks of imperfection and infirmity cleave to writing, as to every other invention of man. All alphabets have been left incomplete. They have superfluous letters, letters, that is, which they do not want, because other letters already represent the sound which they represent; they have dubious letters, letters, that is, which say nothing certain about the sounds they stand for, because more than one sound is represented by them--our ‘c’ for instance, which sometimes has the sound of ‘s’, as in ‘_c_ity’, sometimes of ‘k’, as in ‘_c_at’; they are deficient in letters, that is, the language has elementary sounds which have no corresponding letters appropriated to them, and can only be represented by combinations of letters. All alphabets, I believe, have some of these faults, not a few of them have all, and more. This then is one reason of the imperfect reproduction of the spoken word by the written. But another is, that the human voice is so wonderfully fine and flexible an organ, is able to mark such subtle and delicate distinctions of sound, so infinitely to modify and vary these sounds, that were an alphabet complete as human art could make it, did it possess eight and forty instead of four and twenty letters, there would still remain a multitude of sounds which it could only approximately give back{229}.

{Sidenote: _Alphabets Inadequate_}

But there is a further cause for the divergence which comes gradually to find place between men’s spoken and their written words. What men do often, they will seek to do with the least possible trouble. There is nothing which they do oftener than repeat words; they will seek here then to save themselves pains; they will contract two or more syllables into one; (‘toto opere’ will become ‘topper’; ‘vuestra merced’, ‘usted’; and ‘topside the other way’, ‘topsy-turvey’{230}); they will slur over, and thus after a while cease to pronounce, certain letters; for hard letters they will substitute soft; for those which require a certain effort to pronounce, they will substitute those which require little or none. Under the operation of these causes a gulf between the written and spoken word will not merely exist; but it will have the tendency to grow ever wider and wider. This tendency indeed will be partially counterworked by approximations which from time to time will by silent consent be made of the written word to the spoken; here and there a letter dropped in speech will be dropped also in writing, as the ‘s’ in so many French words, where its absence is marked by a circumflex; a new shape, contracted or briefer, which a word has taken on the lips of men, will find its representation in their writing; as ‘chirurgeon’ will not merely be pronounced, but also spelt, ‘surgeon’, and ‘synodsman’ ‘sidesman’. Still for all this, and despite of these partial readjustments of the relations between the two, the anomalies will be infinite; there will be a multitude of written letters which have ceased to be sounded letters; a multitude of words will exist in one shape upon our lips, and in quite another in our books.

It is inevitable that the question should arise--Shall these anomalies be meddled with? shall it be attempted to remove them, and bring writing and speech into harmony and consent--a harmony and consent which never indeed in actual fact at any period of the language existed, but which yet may be regarded as the object of written speech, as the idea which, however imperfectly realized, has, in the reduction of spoken sounds to written, floated before the minds of men? If the attempt is to be made, it is clear that it can only be made in one way. The alternative is not open, whether Mahomet shall go to the mountain, _or_ the mountain to Mahomet. The spoken word is the mountain; it will not stir; it will resist all interference. It feels its own superior rights, that it existed the first, that it is, so to say, the elder brother; and it will never be induced to change itself for the purpose of conforming and complying with the written word. Men will not be persuaded to pronounce ‘wou_l_d’ and ‘de_b_t’, because they write ‘would’ and ‘debt’ severally with an ‘l’ and with a ‘b’: but what if they could be induced to write ‘woud’ and ‘det’, because they pronounce so; and to deal in like manner with all other words, in which there exists at present a discrepancy between the word as it is spoken, and the word as it is written?

{Sidenote: _Phonetic Systems_}

Here we have the explanation of that which in the history of almost all literatures has repeated itself more than once, namely, the endeavour to introduce phonetic writing. It has certain plausibilities to rest on; it has its appeal to the unquestionable fact that the written word was intended to picture to the eye what the spoken word sounded in the ear. At the same time I believe that it would be impossible to introduce it; and, even if it _were_ possible, that it would be most undesirable, and this for two reasons; the first being that the losses consequent upon its introduction, would far outweigh the gains, even supposing those gains as great as the advocates of the scheme promise; the second, that these promised gains would themselves be only very partially realized, or not at all.

{Sidenote: _Alphabets Imperfect_}

In the first place, I believe it to be impossible. It is clear that such a scheme must begin with the reconstruction of the alphabet. The first thing that the phonographers have perceived is the necessity for the creation of a vast number of new signs, the poverty of all existing alphabets, at any rate of our own, not yielding a several sign for all the several sounds in the language. Our English phonographers have therefore had to invent ten of these new signs or letters, which are henceforth to take their place with our _a_, _b_, _c_, and to enjoy equal rights with them. Rejecting two (_q_, _x_), and adding ten, they have raised their alphabet from twenty-six letters to thirty-four. But to procure the reception of such a reconstructed alphabet is simply an impossibility, as much an impossibility as would be the reconstitution of the structure of the language in any points where it was manifestly deficient or illogical. Sciolists or scholars may sit down in their studies, and devise these new letters, and prove that we need them, and that the introduction of them would be a great gain, and a manifest improvement; and this may be all very true; but if they think they can induce a people to adopt them, they know little of the ways in which its alphabet is entwined with the whole innermost life of a people. One may freely own that all present alphabets are redundant here, are deficient there; our English perhaps is as greatly at fault as any, and with that we have chiefly to do. Unquestionably it has more letters than one to express one and the same sound; it has only one letter to express two or three sounds; it has sounds which are only capable of being expressed at all by awkward and roundabout expedients. Yet at the same time we must accept the fact, as we accept any other which it is out of our power to change--with regret, indeed, but with a perfect acquiescence: as one accepts the fact that Ireland is not some thirty or forty miles nearer to England--that it is so difficult to get round Cape Horn--that the climate of Africa is so fatal to European life. A people will no more quit their alphabet than they will quit their language; they will no more consent to modify the one _ab extra_ than the other. Cæsar avowed that with all his power he could not introduce a new word, and certainly Claudius could not introduce a new letter. Centuries may sanction the bringing in of a new one, or the dropping of an old. But to imagine that it is possible to suddenly introduce a group of ten new letters, as these reformers propose--they might just as feasibly propose that the English language should form its comparatives and superlatives on some entirely new scheme, say in Greek fashion, by the terminations ‘oteros’ and ‘otatos’; or that we should agree to set up a dual; or that our substantives should return to our Anglo-Saxon declensions. Any one of these or like proposals would not betray a whit more ignorance of the eternal laws which regulate human language, and of the limits within which deliberate action upon it is possible, than does this of increasing our alphabet by ten entirely novel signs.

But grant it possible, grant our six and twenty letters to have so little sacredness in them that Englishmen would endure a crowd of upstart interlopers to mix themselves on an equal footing with them, still this could only be from a sense of the greatness of the advantage to be derived from this introduction. Now the vast advantage claimed by the advocates of the system is, that it would facilitate the learning to read, and wholly save the labour of learning to spell, which “on the present plan occupies”, as they assure us, “at the very lowest calculation from three to five years”. Spelling, it is said, would no longer need to be learned at all; since whoever knew the sound, would necessarily know also the spelling, this being in all cases in perfect conformity with that. The anticipation of this gain rests upon two assumptions which are tacitly taken for granted, but both of them erroneous.

The first of these assumptions is, that all men pronounce all words alike, so that whenever they come to spell a word, they will exactly agree as to what the outline of its sound is. Now we are sure men will not do this from the fact that, before there was any fixed and settled orthography in our language, when therefore everybody was more or less a phonographer, seeking to write down the word as it sounded to _him_, (for he had no other law to guide him,) the variations of spelling were infinite. Take for instance the word ‘sudden’; which does not seem to promise any great scope for variety. I have myself met with this word spelt in the following fifteen ways among our early writers: ‘sodain’, ‘sodaine’, ‘sodan’, ‘sodayne’, ‘sodden’, ‘sodein’, ‘sodeine’, ‘soden’, ‘sodeyn’, ‘suddain’, ‘suddaine’, ‘suddein’, ‘suddeine’, ‘sudden’, ‘sudeyn’. Again, in how many ways was Raleigh’s name spelt, or Shakespeare’s? The same is evident from the spelling of uneducated persons in our own day. They have no other rule but the sound to guide them. How is it that they do not all spell alike; erroneously, it may be, as having only the sound for their guide, but still falling all into exactly the same errors? What is the actual fact? They not merely spell wrong, which might be laid to the charge of our perverse system of spelling, but with an inexhaustible diversity of error, and that too in the case of simplest words. Thus the little town of Woburn would seem to give small room for caprice in spelling, while yet the postmaster there has made, from the superscription of letters that have passed through his hands, a collection of two hundred and forty-four varieties of ways in which the place has been spelt{231}. It may be replied that these were all or nearly all from the letters of the ignorant and uneducated. Exactly so;--but it is for their sakes, and to place them on a level with the educated, or rather to accelerate their education by the omission of a useless yet troublesome discipline, that the change is proposed. I wish to show you that after the change they would be just as much, or almost as much, at a loss in their spelling as now.

{Sidenote: _Pronouncing Dictionaries_}

And another reason which would make it quite as necessary then to learn orthography as now, is the following. Pronunciation, as I have already noticed, is far too fine and subtle a thing to be more than approximated to, and indicated in the written letter. In a multitude of cases the difficulties which pronunciation presented would be sought to be overcome in different ways, and thus different spelling, would arise; or if not so, one would have to be arbitrarily selected, and would have need to be learned, just as much as the spelling of a word now has need to be learned. I will only ask you, in proof of this which I affirm, to turn to any Pronouncing Dictionary. That greatest of all absurdities, a Pronouncing Dictionary, may be of some service to you in this matter; it will certainly be of none in any other. When you mark the elaborate and yet ineffectual artifices by which it toils after the finer distinctions of articulation, seeks to reproduce in letters what exists, and can only exist, as the spoken tradition of pronunciation, acquired from lip to lip by the organ of the ear, capable of being learned, but incapable of being taught; or when you compare two of these dictionaries with one another, and mark the entirely different schemes and combinations of letters which they employ for representing the same sound to the eye; you will then perceive how idle the attempt to make the written in language commensurate with the sounded; you will own that not merely out of human caprice, ignorance, or indolence, the former falls short of and differs from the later; but that this lies in the necessity of things, in the fact that man’s _voice_ can effect so much more than ever his _letter_ can{232}. You will then perceive that there would be as much, or nearly as much, of the arbitrary in spelling which calls itself phonetic as in our present, that spelling would have to be learned just as really then as now. We should be unable to dismiss the spelling card even after the arrival of that great day, when, for example, those lines of Pope which hitherto we have thus spelt and read,

“But errs not nature from this gracious end, From burning suns when livid deaths descend, When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep”?

when I say, instead of this they should present themselves to our eyes in the following attractive form:

“But ¿ erz not nɛtiur from ðis grɛcus end, from burniŋ sunz when livid deθs dɨsend, when erθkwɛks swolɵ, or when tempests swɨp tounz tu wun grɛv, hɵl nɛconz tu ðe dɨp”.

{Sidenote: _Losses of Phonetic Spelling_}

The scheme would not then fulfil its promises. Its vaunted gains, when we come to look closely at them, disappear. And now for its losses. There are in every language a vast number of words, which the ear does not distinguish from one another, but which are at once distinguishable to the eye by the spelling. I will only instance a few which are the same parts of speech; thus ‘sun’ and ‘son’; ‘virge’ (‘virga’, now obsolete) and ‘verge’; ‘reign’, ‘rain’, and ‘rein’; ‘hair’ and ‘hare’; ‘plate’ and ‘plait’; ‘moat’ and ‘mote’; ‘pear’ and ‘pair’; ‘pain’ and ‘pane’; ‘raise’ and ‘raze’; ‘air’ and ‘heir’; ‘ark’ and ‘arc’; ‘mite’ and ‘might’; ‘pour’ and ‘pore’; ‘veil’ and ‘vale’; ‘knight’ and ‘night’; ‘knave’ and ‘nave’; ‘pier’ and ‘peer’; ‘rite’ and ‘right’; ‘site’ and ‘sight’; ‘aisle’ and ‘isle’; ‘concent’ and ‘consent’; ‘signet’ and ‘cygnet’. Now, of course, it is a real disadvantage, and may be the cause of serious confusion, that there should be words in spoken languages of entirely different origin and meaning which yet cannot in sound be differenced from one another. The phonographers simply propose to extend this disadvantage already cleaving to our spoken languages, to the written languages as well. It is fault enough in the French language, that ‘mère’ a mother, ‘mer’ the sea, ‘maire’ a mayor of a town, should have no perceptible difference between them in the spoken tongue; or again that in some there should be nothing to distinguish ‘sans’, ‘sang’, ‘sent’, ‘sens’, ‘s’en’, ‘cent’; nor yet between ‘ver’, ‘vert’, ‘verre’ and ‘vers’. Surely it is not very wise to propose gratuitously to extend the same fault to the written languages as well.

This loss in so many instances of the power to discriminate between words, which however liable to confusion now in our spoken language, are liable to none in our written, would be serious enough; but far more serious than this would be the loss which would constantly ensue, of all which visibly connects a word with the past, which tells its history, and indicates the quarter from which it has been derived. In how many English words a letter silent to the ear, is yet most eloquent to the eye--the _g_ for instance in ‘deign’, ‘feign’, ‘reign’, ‘impugn’, telling as it does of ‘dignor’, ‘fingo’, ‘regno’, ‘impugno’; even as the _b_ in ‘debt’, ‘doubt’, is not idle, but tells of ‘debitum’ and ‘dubium’{233}.

{Sidenote: _Pronunciation Alters_}

At present it is the written word which is in all languages their conservative element. In it is the abiding witness against the mutilations or other capricious changes in their shape which affectation, folly, ignorance, and half-knowledge would introduce. It is not indeed always able to hinder the final adoption of these corrupter forms, but does not fail to oppose to them a constant, and very often a successful, resistance. With the adoption of phonetic spelling, this witness would exist no longer; whatever was spoken would have also to be written, let it be never so barbarous, never so great a departure from the true form of the word. Nor is it merely probable that such a barbarizing process, such an adopting and sanctioning of a vulgarism, might take place, but among phonographers it already has taken place. We all probably are aware that there is a vulgar pronunciation of the word ‘Eu_rope_’, as though it were ‘Eu_rup_’. Now it is quite possible that numerically more persons in England may pronounce the word in this manner than in the right; and therefore the phonographers are only true to their principles when they spell it in the fashion which they do, ‘Eurup’, or indeed omitting the E at the beginning, ‘Urup’{234} with thus the life of the first syllable assailed no less than that of the second. What are the consequences? First its relations with the old mythology are at once and entirely broken off; secondly, its most probable etymology from two Greek words, signifying ‘broad’ and ‘face’, Europe being so called from the _Broad_ line or _face_ of coast which our continent presented to the Asiatic Greek, is totally obscured. But so far from the spelling servilely following the pronunciation, I should be bold to affirm that if ninety-nine out of every hundred persons in England chose to call Europe ‘Urup’, this would be a vulgarism still, against which the written word ought to maintain its protest, not sinking down to their level, but rather seeking to elevate them to its own{235}.

{Sidenote: _Changes of Pronunciation_}

And if there is much in orthography which is unsettled now, how much more would be unsettled then. Inasmuch as the pronunciation of words is continually altering, their spelling would of course have continually to alter too. For the fact that pronunciation is undergoing constant changes, although changes for the most part unmarked, or marked only by a few, would be abundantly easy to prove. Take a Pronouncing Dictionary of fifty or a hundred years ago; turn to almost any page, and you will observe schemes of pronunciation there recommended, which are now merely vulgarisms, or which have been dropped altogether. We gather from a discussion in Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_{236}, that in his time ‘great’ was by some of the best speakers of the language pronounced ‘gr_ee_t’, not ‘gr_a_te’: Pope usually rhymes it with ‘cheat’, ‘complete’, and the like; thus in the _Dunciad_:

“Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the _great_, There, stamped with arms, Newcastle shines com_plete_”.

Spenser’s constant use of the word a century and a half earlier, leaves no doubt that such was the invariable pronunciation of his time{237}. Again, Pope rhymes ‘obliged’ with ‘beseiged’; and it has only ceased to be ‘obl_ee_ged’ almost in our own time. Who now drinks a cup of ‘tay’? yet there is abundant evidence that this was the fashionable pronunciation in the first half of the last century; the word, that is, was still regarded as French: Locke writes it ‘thé’; and in Pope’s time, though no longer written, it was still pronounced so. Take this couplet of his in proof:

“Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms _obey_, Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes _tea_”.

So too a pronunciation which still survives, though scarcely among well-educated persons, I mean ‘Room’ for ‘Rome’, must have been in Shakespeare’s time the predominant one, else there would have been no point in that play on words where in _Julius Cæsar_ Cassius, complaining that in all _Rome_ there was not _room_ for a single man, exclaims,

“Now is it _Rome_ indeed, and _room_ enough”.

Samuel Rogers too assures us that in his youth “everybody said ‘Lonnon’{238} not ‘London’; that Fox said ‘Lonnon’ to the last”.

The following quotation from Swift will prove to you that I have been only employing here an argument, which he employed long ago against the phonographers of his time. He exposes thus the futility of their scheme{239}: “Another cause which has contributed not a little to the maiming of our language, is a foolish opinion advanced of late years that we ought to spell exactly as we speak: which, besides the obvious inconvenience of utterly destroying our etymology, would be a thing we should never see an end of. Not only the several towns and counties of England have a different way of pronouncing, but even here in London they clip their words after one manner about the court, another in the city, and a third in the suburbs; and in a few years, it is probable, will all differ from themselves, as fancy or fashion shall direct; all which, reduced to writing, would entirely confound orthography”.

This much I have thought good to say in respect of that entire revolution in English orthography, which some rash innovators have proposed. Let me, dismissing them and their innovations, call your attention now to those changes in spelling which are constantly going forward, at some periods more rapidly than at others, but which never wholly cease out of a language; while at the same time I endeavour to trace, where this is possible, the motives and inducements which bring them about. It is a subject which none can neglect, who desire to obtain even a tolerably accurate acquaintance with their native tongue. Some principles have been laid down in the course of what has been said already, that may help us to judge whether the changes which have found place in our own have been for better or for worse. We shall find, if I am not mistaken, of both kinds.

{Sidenote: ‘_Grogram_’}

There are alterations in spelling which are for the worse. Thus an altered spelling will sometimes obscure the origin of a word, concealing it from those who, but for this, would at once have known whence and what it was, and would have found both pleasure and profit in this knowledge. I need not say that in all those cases where the earlier spelling revealed the secret of the word, told its history, which the latter defaces or conceals, the change has been injurious, and is to be regretted; while, at the same time, where it has thoroughly established itself, there is nothing to do but to acquiesce in it: the attempt to undo it would be absurd. Thus, when ‘gro_c_er’ was spelt ‘gro_ss_er’, it was comparatively easy to see that he first had his name, because he sold his wares not by retail, but in the _gross_. ‘Co_x_comb’ tells us nothing now; but it did when spelt, as it used to be, ‘co_cks_comb’, the _comb_ of a _cock_ being then an ensign or token which the fool was accustomed to wear. In ‘grogra_m_’ we are entirely to seek for the derivation; but in ‘grogra_n_’ or ‘grogra_in_’, as earlier it was spelt, one could scarcely miss ‘grosgrain’, the stuff of a _coarse grain_ or woof. How many now understand ‘woodbin_e_’? but who could have helped understanding ‘woodbin_d_’ (Ben Jonson)? What a mischievous alteration in spelling is ‘d_i_vest’ instead of ‘d_e_vest’{240}. This change is so recent that I am tempted to ask whether it would not here be possible to return to the only intelligible spelling of this word.

{Sidenote: ‘_Pigmy_’}

‘P_i_gmy’ used formerly to be spelt ‘p_y_gmy’, and so long as it was so, no Greek scholar could see the word, but at once he knew that by it were indicated manikins whose measure in height was no greater than that of a man’s arm from the elbow to the closed _fist_{241}. Now he may know this in other ways; but the word itself, so long as he assumes it to be rightly spelt, tells him nothing. Or again, the old spelling, ‘diam_ant_’, was preferable to the modern ‘diam_ond_’. It was preferable, because it told more of the quarter whence the word had reached us. ‘Diamant’ and ‘adamant’ are in fact only two different adoptions on the part of the English tongue, of one and the same Greek, which afterwards became a Latin word. The primary meaning of ‘adamant’ is, as you know, the indomitable, and it was a name given at first to steel as the hardest of metals; but afterwards transferred{242} to the most precious among all the precious stones, as that which in power of resistance surpassed everything besides.

{Sidenote: ‘_Cozen_’, ‘_Bless_’}

Neither are new spellings to be commended, which obliterate or obscure the relationship of a word with others to which it is really allied; separating from one another, for those not thoroughly acquainted with the subject, words of the same family. Thus when ‘_j_aw’ was spelt ‘_ch_aw’, no ne could miss its connexions with the verb ‘to chew’{243}. Now probably ninety-nine out of a hundred who use both words, are entirely unaware of any relationship between them. It is the same with ‘cousin’ (consanguineus), and ‘to cozen’ or to deceive. I do not propose to determine which of these words should conform itself to the spelling of the other. There was great irregularity in the spelling of both from the first; yet for all this, it was then better than now, when a permanent distinction has established itself between them, keeping out of sight that ‘to cozen’ is in all likelihood to deceive under show of kindred and affinity; which if it be so, Shakespeare’s words,

“_Cousins_ indeed, and by their uncle _cozened_ Of comfort”{244},

will be found to contain not a pun, but an etymology{245}. The real relation between ‘bliss’ and ‘to bless’ is in like manner at present obscured{246}.

The omission of a letter, or the addition of a letter, may each effectually do its work in keeping out of sight the true character and origin of a word. Thus the omission of a letter. When the first syllable of ‘bran-new’ was spelt ‘bran_d_’ with a final ‘d’, ‘bran_d_-new’, how vigorous an image did the word contain. The ‘brand’ is the fire, and ‘brand-new’ equivalent to ‘fire-new’ (Shakespeare), is that which is fresh and bright, as being newly come from the forge and fire. As now spelt, ‘bran-new’ conveys to us no image at all. Again, you have the word ‘scrip’--as a ‘scrip’ of paper, government ‘scrip’. Is this the same word with the Saxon ‘scrip’, a wallet, having in some strange manner obtained these meanings so different and so remote? Have we here only two different applications of one and the same word, or two homonyms, wholly different words, though spelt alike? We have only to note the way in which the first of these ‘scrips’ used to be written, namely with a final ‘t’, not ‘scrip’ but ‘scrip_t_’, and we are at once able to answer the question. This ‘script’ is a Latin, as the other is an Anglo-Saxon, word, and meant at first simply a _written_ (scripta) piece of paper--a circumstance which since the omission of the final ‘t’ may easily escape our knowledge. ‘Afraid’ was spelt much better in old times with the double ‘ff’, than with the single ‘f’ as now. It was then clear that it was not another form of ‘afeared’, but wholly separate from it, the participle of the verb ‘to affray’, ‘affrayer’, or, as it is now written, ‘effrayer’{247}.

{Sidenote: ‘_Whole_’, ‘_Hale_’, ‘_Heal_’}

In the cases hitherto adduced, it has been the omission of a letter which has clouded and concealed the etymology. The intrusion of a letter sometimes does the same. Thus in the early editions of _Paradise Lost_, and in all writers of that time, you will find ‘scent’, an odour, spelt ‘sent’. It was better so; there is no other noun substantive ‘sent’, with which it is in danger of being confounded; while its relation with ‘sentio’, with ‘re_sent_’{248}, ‘dis_sent_’, and the like, is put out of sight by its novel spelling; the intrusive ‘_c_’, serves only to mislead. The same thing was attempted with ‘site’, ‘situate’, ‘situation’, spelt for a time by many, ‘s_c_ite’, ‘s_c_ituate’, ‘s_c_ituation’; but it did not continue with these. Again, ‘whole’, in Wiclif’s Bible, and indeed much later, occasionally as far down as Spenser, is spelt ‘hole’, without the ‘w’ at the beginning. The present orthography may have the advantage of at once distinguishing the word to the eye from any other; but at the same time the initial ‘w’, now prefixed, hides its relation to the verb ‘to heal’, with which it is closely allied. The ‘whole’ man is he whose hurt is ‘healed’ or covered{249} (we say of the convalescent that he ‘recovers’){250}; ‘whole’ being closely allied to ‘hale’ (integer), from which also by its modern spelling it is divided. ‘Wholesome’ has naturally followed the fortunes of ‘whole’; it was spelt ‘holsome’ once.

Of ‘island’ too our present spelling is inferior to the old, inasmuch as it suggests a hybrid formation, as though the word were made up of the Latin ‘insula’, and the Saxon ‘land’. It is quite true that ‘isle’ _is_ in relation with, and descent from, ‘insula’, ‘isola’, ‘île’; and hence probably the misspelling of ‘island’. This last however has nothing to do with ‘insula’, being identical with the German ‘eiland’, the Anglo-Saxon ‘ealand’{251} and signifying the sea-land, or land girt, round with the sea. And it is worthy of note that this ‘s’ in the first syllable of ‘island’ is quite of modern introduction. In all the earlier versions of the Scriptures, and in the Authorized Version as at first set forth, it is ‘iland’; while in proof that this is not accidental, it may be observed that, while ‘iland’ has not the ‘s’, ‘isle’ has it (see Rev. i. 9). ‘Iland’ indeed is the spelling which we meet with far down into the seventeenth century.

{Sidenote: _Folk-etymologies_}

What has just been said of ‘island’ leads me as by a natural transition to observe that one of the most frequent causes of alteration in the spelling of a word is a wrongly assumed derivation. It is then sought to bring the word into harmony with, and to make it by its spelling suggest, this derivation, which has been erroneously thrust upon it. Here is a subject which, followed out as it deserves, would form an interesting and instructive chapter in the history of language{252}. Let me offer one or two small contributions to it; noting first by the way how remarkable an evidence we have in this fact, of the manner in which not the learned only, but all persons learned and unlearned alike, crave to have these words not body only, but body and soul. What an attestation, I say, of this lies in the fact that where a word in its proper derivation is unintelligible to them, they will shape and mould it into some other form, not enduring that it should be a mere inert sound without sense in their ears; and if they do not know its right origin, will rather put into it a wrong one, than that it should have for them no meaning, and suggest no derivation at all{253}.

There is probably no language in which such a process has not been going forward; in which it is not the explanation, in a vast number of instances, of changes in spelling and even in form, which words have undergone. I will offer a few examples of it from foreign tongues, before adducing any from our own. ‘Pyramid’ is a word, the spelling of which was affected in the Greek by an erroneous assumption of its derivation; the consequences of this error surviving in our own word to the present day. It is spelt by us with a ‘y’ in the first syllable, as it was spelt with the υ corresponding in the Greek. But why was this? It was because the Greeks assumed that the pyramids were so named from their having the appearance of _flame_ going up into a point{254}, and so they spelt ‘pyramid’, that they might find πῦρ or ‘pyre’ in it; while in fact ‘pyramid’ has nothing to do with flame or fire at all; being, as those best qualified to speak on the matter declare to us, an Egyptian word of quite a different signification{255}, and the Coptic letters being much better represented by the diphthong ‘ei’ than by the letter ‘y’, as no doubt, but for this mistaken notion of what the word was intended to mean, they would have been.

Once more--the form ‘Hierosolyma’, wherein the Greeks reproduced the Hebrew ‘Jerusalem’, was intended in all probability to express that the city so called was the _sacred_ city of the _Solymi_{256}. At all events the intention not merely of reproducing the Hebrew word, but also of making it significant in Greek, of finding ἱερόν in it, is plainly discernible. For indeed the Greeks were exceedingly intolerant of foreign words, till they had laid aside their foreign appearance--of all words which they could not thus quicken with a Greek soul; and, with a very characteristic vanity, an ignoring of all other tongues but their own, assumed with no apparent misgivings that all words, from whatever quarter derived, were to be explained by Greek etymologies{257}.

‘Tartar’ is another word, of which it is at least possible that a wrongly assumed derivation has modified the spelling, and indeed not the spelling only, but the very shape in which we now possess it. To many among us it may be known that the people designated by this appellation are not properly ‘Tartars’, but ‘Tatars’; and you sometimes perhaps have noted the omission of the ‘r’ on the part of those who are curious in their spelling. How, then, it may be asked, did the form ‘Tartar’ arise? When the terrible hordes of middle Asia burst in upon civilized Europe in the thirteenth century, many beheld in the ravages of their innumerable cavalry a fulfilment of that prophetic word in the Revelation (chap. ix.) concerning the opening of the bottomless pit; and from this belief ensued the change of their name from ‘Tatars’ to ‘Tartars’, which was thus put into closer relation with ‘Tartarus’ or hell, out of which their multitudes were supposed to have proceeded{258}.

Another good example in the same kind is the German word ‘sündflut’, the Deluge, which is now so spelt as to signify a ‘sinflood’, the plague or _flood_ of waters brought on the world by the _sins_ of mankind; and probably some of us have before this admired the pregnant significance of the word. Yet the old High German word had originally no such intention; it was spelt ‘sinfluot’, that is, the great flood; and as late as Luther, indeed in Luther’s own translation of the Bible, is so spelt as to make plain that the notion of a ‘_sin_-flood’ had not yet found its way into, even as it had not affected the spelling of, the word{259}.

{Sidenote: ‘_Currants_’}

But to look now nearer home for our examples. The little raisins brought from Greece, which play so important a part in one of the national dishes of England, the Christmas plum-pudding, used to be called ‘corinths’; and so you would find them in mercantile lists of a hundred years ago: either that for the most part they were shipped from Corinth, the principal commercial city in Greece, or because they grew in large abundance in the immediate district round about it. Their likeness in shape and size and general appearance to our own currants, working together with the ignorance of the great majority of English people about any such place as Corinth, soon brought the name ‘corinths’ into ‘currants’, which now with a certain unfitness they bear; being not currants at all, but dried grapes, though grapes of diminutive size{260}.

{Sidenote: ‘_Court-cards_’}

‘_Court_-cards’, that is, the king, queen, and knave in each suit, were once ‘coat-cards’{261}; having their name from the long splendid ‘coat’ (vestis talaris) with which they were arrayed. Probably ‘coat’ after a while did not perfectly convey its original meaning and intention; being no more in common use for the long garment reaching down to the heels; and then ‘coat’ was easily exchanged for ‘court’, as the word is now both spelt and pronounced, seeing that nowhere so fitly as in a Court should such splendidly arrayed personages be found. A public house in the neighbourhood of London having a few years since for its sign “The George _Canning_” is already “The George and _Cannon_”,--so rapidly do these transformations proceed, so soon is that forgotten which we suppose would never be forgotten. “Welsh _rarebit_” becomes “Welsh _rabbit_”{262}; and ‘_farced_’ or stuffed ‘meat’ becomes “forced meat”. Even the mere determination to make a word _look_ English, to put it into an English shape, without thereby so much as seeming to attain any result in the way of etymology, this is very often sufficient to bring about a change in its spelling, and even in its form{263}. It is thus that ‘sipahi’ has become ‘sepoy’; and only so could ‘weissager’ have taken its present form of ‘wiseacre’{264}.

{Sidenote: _Transformation of Words_}

It is not very uncommon for a word, while it is derived from one word, to receive a certain impulse and modification from another. This extends sometimes beyond the spelling, and in cases where it does so, would hardly belong to our present theme. Still I may notice an instance or two. Thus our ‘obsequies’ is the Latin ‘exequiæ’, but formed under a certain impulse of ‘obsequium’, and seeking to express and include the observant honour of that word. ‘To refuse’ is ‘recusare’, while yet it has derived the ‘f’ of its second syllable from ‘refutare’; it is a medley of the two{265}. The French ‘rame’, an oar, is ‘remus’, but that modified by an unconscious recollection of ‘ramus’. ‘Orange’ is no doubt a Persian word, which has reached us through the Arabic, and which the Spanish ‘naranja’ more nearly represents than any form of it existing in the other languages of Europe. But what so natural as to think of the orange as the _golden_ fruit, especially when the “_aurea_ mala” of the Hesperides were familiar to all antiquity? There cannot be a doubt that ‘aurum’, ‘oro’, ‘or’, made themselves felt in the shapes which the word assumed in the languages of the West, and that here we have the explanation of the change in the first syllable, as in the low Latin ‘aurantium’, ‘orangia’, and in the French ‘orange’, which has given us our own.

It is foreign words, or words adopted from foreign languages, as might beforehand be expected, which are especially subjected to such transformations as these. The soul which the word once had in its own language, having, for as many as do not know that language, departed from it, or at least not being now any more to be recognized by such as employ the word, these are not satisfied till they have put another soul into it, and it has thus become alive to them again. Thus--to take first one or two very familiar instances, but which serve as well as any other to illustrate my position--the Bellerophon becomes for our sailors the ‘Billy Ruffian’, for what can they know of the Greek mythology, or of the slayer of Chimæra? an iron steamer, the Hirondelle, now or lately plying on the Tyne, is the ‘Iron Devil’. ‘_Contre_ danse’, or dance in which the parties stand _face to face_ with one another, and which ought to have appeared in English as ‘_counter_ dance’, does become ‘_country_ dance’{266}, as though it were the dance of the country folk and rural districts, as distinguished from the quadrille and waltz and more artificial dances of the town{267}. A well known rose, the “rose _des quatre saisons_”, or of the four seasons, becomes on the lips of some of our gardeners, the “rose of the _quarter sessions_”, though here it is probable that the eye has misled, rather than the ear. ‘Dent de lion’, (it is spelt ‘dentdelyon’ in our early writers) becomes ‘dandylion’, “_chaude_ melée”, or an affray in _hot_ blood, “_chance_-medley”{268}, ‘causey’ (chaussée) becomes ‘causeway’{269}, ‘rachitis’ ‘rickets’{270}, and in French ‘mandragora’ ‘main de gloire’{271}.

{Sidenote: ‘_Necromancy_’}

‘Necromancy’ is another word which, if not now, yet for a long period was erroneously spelt, and indeed assumed a different shape, under the influence of an erroneous derivation; which, curiously enough, even now that it has been dismissed, has left behind it the marks of its presence, in our common phrase, “the _Black_ Art”. I need hardly remind you that ‘necromancy’ is a Greek word, which signifies, according to its proper meaning, a prophesying by aid of the dead, or that it rests on the presumed power of raising up by potent spells the dead, and compelling them to give answers about things to come. We all know that it was supposed possible to exercise such power; we have a very awful example of it in the story of the witch of Endor, and a very horrid one in Lucan{272}. But the Latin medieval writers, whose Greek was either little or none, spelt the word, ‘nigromantia’, as if its first syllables had been Latin: at the same time, not wholly forgetting the original meaning, but in fact getting round to it though by a wrong process, they understood the dead by these ‘nigri’, or blacks, whom they had brought into the word{273}. Down to a rather late period we find the forms, ‘_negro_mancer’ and ‘_negro_mancy’ frequent in English.

{Sidenote: _Words Misspelt_}

‘Pleurisy’ used often to be spelt, (I do not think it is so now,) without an ‘e’ in the first syllable, evidently on the tacit assumption that it was from _plus pluris_{274}. When Shakespeare falls into an error, he “makes the offence gracious”; yet, I think, he would scarcely have written,

“For goodness growing to a _plurisy_ Dies of his own _too much_”,

but that _he_ too derived ‘plurisy’ from _pluris_. This, even with the “small Latin and less Greek”, which Ben Jonson allows him, he scarcely would have done, had the word presented itself in that form, which by right of its descent from πλευρά (being a pain, stitch, or sickness _in the side_) it ought to have possessed. Those who for ‘crucible’ wrote ‘chrysoble’ (Jeremy Taylor does so) must evidently have done this under the assumption that the Greek for _gold_, and not the Latin for _cross_, lay at the foundation of this word. ‘Anthymn’ instead of ‘anthem’ (Barrow so spells the word), rests plainly on a wrong etymology, even as this spelling clearly betrays what that wrong etymology is. ‘Rhyme’ with a ‘y’ is a modern misspelling; and would never have been but for the undue influence which the Greek ‘rhythm’ has exercised upon it. Spenser and his cotemporaries spell it ‘rime’. ‘Abominable’ was by some etymologists of the seventeenth century spelt ‘abhominable’, as though it were that which departed from the human (ab homine) into the bestial or devilish.

In all these words which I have adduced last, the correct spelling has in the end resumed its sway. It is not so with ‘frontisp_ie_ce’, which ought to be spelt ‘frontisp_i_ce’ (it was so by Milton and others), being the low Latin ‘frontispicium’, from ‘frons’ and ‘aspicio’, the forefront of the building, that part which presents itself to the view. It was only the entirely ungrounded notion that the word ‘piece’ constitutes the last syllable, which has given rise to our present orthography{275}.

{Sidenote: Wrong Spelling}

You may, perhaps, wonder that I have dwelt so long on these details of spelling; that I have bestowed on them so much of my own attention, that I have claimed for them so much of yours; yet in truth I cannot regard them as unworthy of our very closest heed. For indeed of how much beyond itself is accurate or inaccurate spelling the certain indication. Thus when we meet ‘s_y_ren’, for ‘s_i_ren’, as so strangely often we do, almost always in newspapers, and often where we should hardly have expected (I met it lately in the _Quarterly Review_, and again in Gifford’s _Massinger_), how difficult it is not to be “judges of evil thoughts”, and to take this slovenly misspelling as the specimen and evidence of an inaccuracy and ignorance which reaches very far wider than the single word which is before us. But why is it that so much significance is ascribed to a wrong spelling? Because ignorance of a word’s spelling at once argues ignorance of its origin and derivation. I do not mean that one who spells rightly may not be ignorant of it too, but he who spells wrongly is certainly so. Thus, to recur to the example I have just adduced, he who for ‘s_i_ren’ writes ‘s_y_ren’, certainly knows nothing of the magic _cords_ (σειραί) of song, by which those fair enchantresses were supposed to draw those that heard them to their ruin{276}.

Correct or incorrect orthography being, then, this note of accurate or inaccurate knowledge, we may confidently conclude where two spellings of a word exist, and are both employed by persons who generally write with precision and scholarship, that there must be something to account for this. It will generally be worth your while to inquire into the causes which enable both spellings to hold their ground and to find their supporters, not ascribing either one or the other to mere carelessness or error. It will in these cases often be found that two spellings exist, because two views of the word’s origin exist, and each of those spellings is the correct expression of one of these. The question therefore which way of spelling should continue, and wholly supersede the other, and which, while the alternative remains, we should ourselves employ, can only be settled by settling which of these etymologies deserves the preference. So is it, for example, with ‘ch_y_mist’ and ‘ch_e_mist’, neither of which has obtained in our common use the complete mastery over the other{277}. It is not here, as in some other cases, that one is certainly right, the other as certainly wrong: but they severally represent two different etymologies of the word, and each is correct according to its own. If we are to spell ‘ch_y_mist’ and ‘ch_y_mistry’, it is because these words are considered to be derived from the Greek word, χυμός, sap; and the chymic art will then have occupied itself first with distilling the juice and sap of plants, and will from this have derived its name. I have little doubt, however, that the other spelling, ‘ch_e_mist’, not ‘ch_y_mist’, is the correct one. It was not with the distillation of herbs, but with the amalgamation of metals, that chemistry occupied itself at its rise, and the word embodies a reference to Egypt, the land of Ham or ‘Cham’{278}, in which this art was first practised with success.

{Sidenote: ‘_Satyr_’, ‘_Satire_’}

Of how much confusion the spelling which used to be so common, ‘satyr’ for ‘satire’, is at once the consequence, the expression, and again the cause; not indeed that this confusion first began with us{279}; for the same already found place in the Latin, where ‘satyricus’ was continually written for ‘satiricus’ out of a false assumption of the identity between the Roman _satire_ and the Greek _satyric_ drama. The Roman ‘satira’,--I speak of things familiar to many of my hearers,--is properly a _full_ dish (lanx being understood)--a dish heaped up with various ingredients, a ‘farce’ (according to the original signification of that word), or hodge-podge; and the word was transferred from this to a form of poetry which at first admitted the utmost variety in the materials of which it was composed, and the shapes into which these materials were wrought up; being the only form of poetry which the Romans did _not_ borrow from the Greeks. Wholly different from this, having no one point of contact with it in its form, its history, or its intention, is the ‘satyric’ drama of Greece, so called because Silenus and the ‘Satyrs’ supplied the chorus; and in their naïve selfishness, and mere animal instincts, held up before men a mirror of what they would be, if only the divine, which is also the truly human, element of humanity, were withdrawn; what man, all that properly made him man being withdrawn, would prove.

{Sidenote: ‘_Mid-wife_’, ‘_Nostril_’}

And then what light, as we have already seen, does the older spelling of a word often cast upon its etymology; how often does it clear up the mystery, which would otherwise have hung about it, or which _had_ hung about it till some one had noticed and turned to profit this its earlier spelling. Thus ‘dirge’ is always spelt ‘dirige’ in early English. This ‘dirige’ may be the first word in a Latin psalm or prayer once used at funerals; there is a reasonable probability that the explanation of the word is here; at any rate, if it is not here, it is nowhere{280}. The derivation of ‘mid-wife’ is uncertain, and has been the subject of discussion; but when we find it spelt ‘medewife’ and ‘meadwife’, in Wiclif’s Bible, this leaves hardly a doubt that it is the _wife_ or woman who acts for a _mead_ or reward{281}. In cases too where there was no mystery hanging about a word, how often does the early spelling make clear to all that which was before only known to those who had made the language their study. For example, if an early edition of Spenser should come into your hands, or a modern one in which the early spelling is retained, what continual lessons in English might you derive from it. Thus ‘nostril’ is always spelt by him and his cotemporaries ‘nosethrill’; a little earlier it was ‘nosethirle’. Now ‘to thrill’ is the same as to drill or pierce; it is plain then here at once that the word signifies the orifice or opening with which the _nose_ is _thrilled_, drilled, or pierced. We might have read the word for ever in our modern spelling without being taught this. ‘Ell’ tells us nothing about itself; but in ‘eln’ used in Holland’s translation of Camden, we recognize ‘ulna’ at once.

Again, the ‘morris’ or ‘morrice-dance’, which is alluded to so often by our early poets, as it is now spelt informs us nothing about itself; but read ‘_moriske_ dance’, as it is generally spelt by Holland and his cotemporaries, and you will scarcely fail to perceive that of which indeed there is no manner of doubt; namely, that it was so called either because it was really, or was supposed to be, a dance in use among the _moriscoes_ of Spain, and from thence introduced into England{282}.

Again, philologers tell us, and no doubt rightly, that our ‘cray-fish’, or ‘craw-fish’, is the French ‘écrevisse’. This is true, but certainly it is not self-evident. Trace however the word through these successive spellings, ‘krevys’ (Lydgate), ‘crevish’ (Gascoigne), ‘craifish’ (Holland), and the chasm between ‘cray-fish’ or ‘craw-fish’ and ‘écrevisse’ is by aid of these three intermediate spellings bridged over at once; and in the fact of our Gothic ‘fish’ finding its way into this French word we see only another example of a law, which has been already abundantly illustrated in this lecture{283}.

{Sidenote: ‘_Emmet_’, ‘_Ant_’}

In other ways also an accurate taking note of the spelling of words, and of the successive changes which it has undergone, will often throw light upon them. Thus we may know, others having assured us of the fact, that ‘ant’ and ‘emmet’ were originally only two different spellings of one and the same word; but we may be perplexed to understand how two forms of a word, now so different, could ever have diverged from a single root. When however we find the different spellings, ‘emmet’, ‘emet’, ‘amet’, ‘amt’, ‘ant’, the gulf which appeared to separate ‘emmet’ from ‘ant’ is bridged over at once, and we do not merely know on the assurance of others that these two are in fact identical, their differences being only superficial, but we perceive clearly in what manner they are so{284}.

Even before any close examination of the matter, it is hard not to suspect that ‘runagate’ is in fact another form of ‘renegade’, slightly transformed, as so many words, to put an English signification into its first syllable; and then the meaning gradually modified in obedience to the new derivation which was assumed to be its original and true one. Our suspicion of this is very greatly strengthened (for we see how very closely the words approach one another), by the fact that ‘renega_d_e’ is constantly spelt ‘renega_t_e’ in our old authors, while at the same time the denial of _faith_, which is now a necessary element in ‘renegade’, and one differencing it inwardly from ‘runagate’, is altogether wanting in early use--the denial of _country_ and of the duties thereto owing being all that is implied in it. Thus it is constantly employed in Holland’s _Livy_ as a rendering of ‘perfuga’{285}; while in the one passage where ‘runagate’ occurs in the Prayer Book Version of the Psalms (Ps. lxviii. 6), a reference to the original will show that the translators could only have employed it there on the ground that it also expressed rebel, revolter, and not runaway merely{286}.

{Sidenote: _Assimilating Power of English_}

I might easily occupy your attention much longer, so little barren or unfruitful does this subject of spelling appear likely to prove; but all things must have an end; and as I concluded my first lecture with a remarkable testimony borne by an illustrious German scholar to the merits of our English tongue, I will conclude my last with the words of another, not indeed a German, but still of the great Germanic stock; words resuming in themselves much of which we have been speaking upon this and upon former occasions: “As our bodies”, he says, “have hidden resources and expedients, to remove the obstacles which the very art of the physician puts in its way, so language, ruled by an indomitable inward principle, triumphs in some degree over the folly of grammarians. Look at the English, polluted by Danish and Norman conquests, distorted in its genuine and noble features by old and recent endeavours to mould it after the French fashion, invaded by a hostile entrance of Greek and Latin words, threatening by increasing hosts to overwhelm the indigenous terms. In these long contests against the combined power of so many forcible enemies, the language, it is true, has lost some of its power of inversion in the structure of sentences, the means of denoting the difference of gender, and the nice distinctions by inflection and termination--almost every word is attacked by the spasm of the accent and the drawing of consonants to wrong positions; yet the old English principle is not overpowered. Trampled down by the ignoble feet of strangers, its springs still retain force enough to restore itself. It lives and plays through all the veins of the language; it impregnates the innumerable strangers entering its dominions with its temper, and stains them with its colour, not unlike the Greek which in taking up oriental words, stripped them of their foreign costume, and bid them to appear as native Greeks”{287}.

{FOOTNOTES}

{228} In proof that it need not be so, I would only refer to a paper, _On Orthographical Expedients_, by Edwin Guest, Esq., in the _Transactions of the Philological Society_, vol. iii. p. 1.

{229} [The scientific treatises on Phonetics of Mr. Alexander J. Ellis and Dr. Henry Sweet have surmounted the difficulty of registering sounds with great accuracy.]

{230} I have not observed this noticed in our dictionaries as the original form of the phrase. There is no doubt however of the fact; see _Stanihurst’s Ireland_, p. 33, in Holinshed’s _Chronicles_. [Rather from _torvien_, to throw,--Skeat].

{231} _Notes and Queries_, No. 147.

{232} See Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_, Croker’s edit. 1848, p. 233.

{233} [The _b_ was purposely foisted into these words by bookmen to suggest their Latin derivation; it did not belong to them in earlier English. The same may be said of the _g_, intruded into ‘deign’ and ‘feign’.]

{234} A chief phonographer writes to me to deny that this is the present spelling (1856) of ‘Europe’. It was so when this paragraph was written. [Most people would now consider [Yeuroap] as American pronunciation.]

{235} Quintilian has expressed himself with the true dignity of a scholar on this matter (_Inst._ 1, 6, 45): Consuetudinem sermonis vocabo _consensum eruditorum_; sicut vivendi consensum bonorum.--How different from innovations like this the changes in the spelling of German which J. Grimm, so far as his own example may reach, _has_ introduced; and the still bolder and more extensive ones which in the _Preface_ to his _Deutsches Wörterbuch_, pp. liv.-lxii., he avows his desire to see introduced;--as the employment of _f_, not merely where it is at present used, but also wherever _v_ is now employed; the substituting of the _v_, which would be thus disengaged, for _w_, and the entire dismissal of _w_. They may be advisable, or they may not; it is not for strangers to offer an opinion; but at any rate they are not a seizing of the fluctuating, superficial accidents of the present, and a seeking to give permanent authority to these, but they all rest on a deep historic study of the language, and of the true genius of the language.

{236} Croker’s edit. 1848, pp. 57, 61, 233.

{237} [An incorrect conclusion. Almost all ‘ea’ words were pronounced ‘ai’ down to the eighteenth century. Thus ‘great’ was a true rhyme to ‘cheat’ and ‘complete’, their ordinary pronunciation being ‘grait’, ‘chait’, ‘complait’.]

{238} [i.e. ‘Lunnun’.]

{239} _A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English Tongue_, 1711, Works, vol. ix, pp. 139-59.

{240} [‘Devest’ was still in use till the end of the eighteenth century, but ‘divest’ is already found in _King Lear_, 1605, i, 1, 50.]

{241} Pygmæi, quasi _cubitales_ (Augustine).

{242} First so used by Theophrastus in Greek, and by Pliny in Latin.--The real identity of the two words explains Milton’s use of ‘diamond’ in _Paradise Lost_, b. 7; and also in that sublime passage in his _Apology for Smectymnuus_: “Then zeal, whose substance is ethereal, arming in complete _diamond_”.--Diez (_Wörterbuch d. Roman. Sprachen_, p. 123) supposes, not very probably, that it was under a certain influence of ‘_dia_fano’, the translucent, that ‘adamante’ was in the Italian, whence we have derived the word, changed into ‘_dia_mante’.

{243} [Similarly _jowl_ for _chowl_ or _chavel_.]

{244} _Richard III_, Act iv, Sc. 4.

{245} [For another account of this word, approved by Dr. Murray, see _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 156.]

{246} [‘Bliss’ representing the old English _bliths_ or _blidhs_, blitheness, is really a quite distinct word from ‘bless’, standing for _blets_, old English _blétsian_ (=_blóedsian_, to consecrate with blood, _blód_), although the latter was by a folk-etymology very frequently spelt ‘bliss’.]

{247} [But ‘afraied’ is the earliest form of the word (1350), the verb itself being at first spelt ‘afray’ (1325). N.E.D.]

{248} How close this relationship was once, not merely in respect of etymology, but also of significance, a passage like this will prove: “Perchance, as vultures are said to smell the earthiness of a dying corpse; so this bird of prey [the evil spirit which personated Samuel, 1 Sam. xxviii. 41] _resented_ a worse than earthly savor in the soul of Saul, as evidence of his death at hand”. (Fuller, _The Profane State_, b. 5, c. 4.)

{249} [There is an unfortunate confusion here between ‘heal’ to make ‘hale’ or ‘[w]hole’ (Anglo-Saxon _hælan_) and the old (and Provincial) English _hill_, to cover, _hilling_, covering, _hellier_, a slater, akin to ‘hell’, the covered place, ‘helm’; Icelandic _hylja_, to cover.]

{250} [By a curious slip Dr. Trench here confounds ‘recover’, to recuperate or regain health (derived through old French _recovrer_ from Latin _recuperare_), with a totally distinct word _re-cover_, to cover or clothe over again, which comes from old French _covrir_, Latin _co-operire_. It is just the difference between ‘recovering’ a lost umbrella through the police and ‘recovering’ a torn one at a shop. I pointed this out to the author in 1869, and I think he altered the passage in his later editions.]

{251} [‘Island’, though cognate with Anglo-Saxon _eá-land_ “water-land” (German _ei-land_), is really identical with Anglo-Saxon _íg-land_, i.e. “isle-land”, from _íg_, an island, the diminutive of which survives in _eyot_ or _ait_.]

{252} [The editor essayed to make a complete collection of this class of words in his _Folk-etymology, a Dictionary of Words corrupted by False Derivation or Mistaken Analogy_, 1882, and more recently in a condensed form in _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, 1904.]

{253} Diez looks with much favour on this process, and calls it, ein sinnreiches mittel fremdlinge ganz heimisch zu machen.

{254} Ammianus Marcellinus, xxii, 15, 28.

{255} [The Greek _pyramis_ probably represents the Egyptian _piri-m-ûisi_ (Maspero, _Dawn of Civilization_, 358), or _pir-am-us_ (Brugsch, _Egypt under the Pharaohs_, i, 73), rather than _pi-ram_, ‘the height’ (Birch, _Bunsen’s Egypt_, v, 763).]

{256} Tacitus, _Hist._ v. 2.

{257} Let me illustrate this by further instances in a note. Thus βούτυρον, from which, through the Latin, our ‘butter’ has descended to us, is borrowed (Pliny, _H.N._ xxviii. 9) from a Scythian word, now to us unknown: yet it is sufficiently plain that the Greeks so shaped and spelt it as to contain apparent allusion to _cow_ and _cheese_; there is in βούτυρον an evident feeling after βοῦς and τυρόν. Bozra, meaning citadel in Hebrew and Phœnician, and the name, no doubt, which the citadel of Carthage bore, becomes Βύρσα on Greek lips; and then the well known legend of the ox-hide was invented upon the name; not having suggested it, but being itself suggested by it. Herodian (v. 6) reproduces the name of the Syrian goddess Astarte in a shape that is significant also for Greek ears--Ἀστροάρχη, The Star-ruler, or Star-queen. When the apostate and hellenizing Jews assumed Greek names, ‘Eliakim’ or “Whom God has set”, became ‘Alcimus’ (ἄλκιμος) or The Strong (1 Macc. vii. 5). Latin examples in like kind are ‘com_i_ssatio’, spelt continually ‘com_e_ssatio’, and ‘com_e_ssation’ by those who sought to naturalize it in England, as though it were connected with ‘cŏmedo’, to eat, being indeed the substantive from the verb ‘cōmissari’ (--κωμάζειν), to revel, as Plutarch, whose Latin is in general not very accurate, long ago correctly observed; and ‘orichalcum’, spelt often ‘_au_richalcum’, as though it were a composite metal of mingled _gold_ and brass; being indeed the _mountain_ brass (ὀρείχαλκος). The miracle play, which is ‘mystère’, in French, whence our English ‘mystery’ was originally written ‘mistère’, being properly derived from ‘ministère’, and having its name because the clergy, the _ministri_ Ecclesiæ, conducted it. This was forgotten, and it then took its present form of ‘mystery’, as though so called because the mysteries of the faith were in it set out.

{258} We have here, in this bringing of the words by their supposed etymology together, the explanation of the fact that Spenser (_Fairy Queen_, i, 7, 44), Middleton (_Works_, vol. 5, pp. 524, 528, 538), and others employ ‘Tartary’ as equivalent to ‘Tartarus’ or hell.

{259} For a full discussion of this matter and fixing of the period at which ‘sinfluot’ became ‘sündflut’, see the _Theol. Stud. u. Krit._ vol. ii, p. 613; and Delitzsch, _Genesis_, 2nd ed. vol. ii, p. 210.

{260} [The name of the small grape, originally _raisins de Corauntz_, was transferred to the _ribes_ in the sixteenth century.]

{261} Ben Jonson, _The New Inn_, Act i, Sc. i.

{262} [On the contrary, it is the modern “Welsh _rarebit_” which has been mistakenly evolved out of the older “Welsh _rabbit_” as I have shown in _Folk-Etymology_, p. 431. Grose has both forms in his _Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue_, 1785.]

{263} ‘Leghorn’ is sometimes quoted as an example of this; but erroneously; for, as Admiral Smyth has shown (_The Mediterranean_, p. 409) ‘Livorno’ is itself rather the modern corruption, and ‘Ligorno’ the name found on the earlier charts.

{264} Exactly the same happens in other languages; thus ‘armbrust’, a crossbow, _looks_ German enough, and yet has nothing to do with ‘arm’ or ‘brust’, being a contraction of ‘arcubalista’, but a contraction under these influences. As little has ‘abenteuer’ anything to do with ‘abend’ or ‘theuer’, however it may seem to be connected with them, being indeed the Provençal ‘adventura’. And ‘weissagen’ in its earlier forms had nothing in common with ‘sagen’.

{265} [So Diez. But Prof. Skeat and Scheler see no reason why it should not be direct from French _refuser_ and Low Latin _refusare_, from _refusus_, rejected.]

{266} It is upon this word that De Quincey (_Life and Manners_, p. 70, American Ed.) says excellently well: “It is in fact by such corruptions, by off-sets upon an old stock, arising through ignorance or mispronunciation originally, that every language is frequently enriched; and new modifications of thought, unfolding themselves in the progress of society, generate for themselves concurrently appropriate expressions.... It must not be allowed to weigh against a word once fairly naturalized by all, that originally it crept in upon an abuse or a corruption. Prescription is as strong a ground of legitimation in a case of this nature, as it is in law. And the old axiom is applicable--Fieri non debuit, factum valet. Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much of their wealth”. [_Works_, vol. xiv., p. 201.]

{267} [The direct opposite is the fact. The French _contredanse_ was borrowed from the English ‘country-dance’. See _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 153.]

{268} [These words are not identical. They were in use as distinct words in the fifteenth century. See N.E.D.]

{269} [Dr. Murray has shown that ‘causeway’ is not a corruption of ‘causey’ but a compound of that word with ‘way’.]

{270} [Prof. Skeat has demonstrated that the supposed Greek ‘rachitis’, inflammation of the back, is an ætiological invention to serve as etymon of ‘rickets’, the condition of being rickety, a purely native word. See also _Folk-Etymology_, 312.]

{271} [See _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 124.]

{272} _Phars._ vi. 720-830.

{273} Thus in a _Vocabulary_, 1475: Nigromansia dicitur divinatio facta _per nigros_.

{274} [Dyce believed that it was really thus derived and distinct from _pleurisy_, but it was evidently modelled upon that word (_Remarks on Editions of Shakespeare_, p. 218).]

{275} As ‘orthography’ itself means properly “_right_ spelling”, it might be a curious question whether it is permissible to speak of an _incorrect_ _ortho_graphy, that is of a _wrong_ _right_-spelling. The question which would be thus started is one of not unfrequent recurrence, and it is very worthy of observation how often, so soon as we take note of etymologies, this _contradictio in adjecto_ is found to occur. I will here adduce a few examples from the Greek, the Latin, the German, and from our own tongue. Thus the Greeks having no convenient word to express a rider, apart from a rider _on a horse_, did not scruple to speak of the _horse_man (ἱππεύς) upon an _elephant_. They often allowed themselves in a like inaccuracy, where certainly there was no necessity; as in using ἀνδριάς of the statue of a _woman_; where it would have been quite as easy to have used εἱκών or ἄγαλμα. So too their ‘table’ (τράπεζα = τετράπεζα) involved probably the _four_ feet which commonly support one; yet they did not shrink from speaking of a _three_-footed table (τρίπους τράπεζα), in other words, a “_three_-footed _four_-footed”; much as though we should speak of a “_three_-footed _quadru_ped”. Homer writes of a ‘hecatomb’ not of a _hundred_, but of twelve, oxen; and elsewhere of Hebe he says, in words not reproducible in English, νέκταρ ἐωνοχόει. ‘Tetrarchs’ were often rulers of quite other than _fourth_ parts of a land. Ἀκρατος had so come to stand for wine, without any thought more of its signifying originally the _unmingled_, that St. John speaks of ἄκρατος κεκερασμένος (Rev. xiv. 10), or the unmingled mingled. Boxes in which precious ointments were contained were so commonly of alabaster, that the name came to be applied to them whether they were so or not; and Theocritus celebrates “_golden_ alabasters”. Cicero having to mention a water-clock is obliged to call it a _water_ _sun_dial (solarium ex aquâ). Columella speaks of a “_vintage_ of honey” (vindemia mellis), and Horace invites his friend to im_pede_, not his _foot_, but his head, with myrtle (_caput_ im_ped_ire myrto). Thus too a German writer who desired to tell of the golden shoes with which the folly of Caligula adorned his horse could scarcely avoid speaking of _golden_ hoof-_irons_. The same inner contradiction is involved in such language as our own, a “_false_ _ver_dict”, a “_steel_ _cuirass_” (‘coriacea’ from corium, leather), “antics new” (Harrington’s _Ariosto_), an “_erroneous_ _etymo_logy”, a “_corn_ _chandler_”; that is, a “_corn_ _candle_-maker”, “_rather_ _late_”, ‘rather’ being the comparative of ‘rathe’, early, and thus “rather late” being indeed “more early late”; and in others.

{276} [‘Siren’ is now generally understood to have meant originally a songstress, from the root _svar_, to sing or sound, seen in _syrinx_, a flute, _su(r)-sur-us_, etc. See J. E. Harrison, _Myths of the Odyssey_, p. 175.]

{277} [‘Chymist’ seems to be the oldest form of the word in English; see N.E.D.]

{278} χημία, the name of Egypt; see Plutarch, _De Is. et Os._ c. 33.

{279} We have a notable evidence how deeply rooted this error was, how long this confusion endured, of the way in which it was shared by the learned as well as the unlearned, in Milton’s _Apology for Smectymnuus_, sect. 7, which everywhere presumes the identity of the ‘satyr’ and the ‘satirist’. It was Isaac Casaubon who first effectually dissipated it even for the learned world. The results of his investigations were made popular for the unlearned reader by Dryden, in the very instructive _Discourse on Satirical Poetry_, prefixed to his translations of Juvenal; but the confusion still survives, and ‘satyrs’ and ‘satires’, the Greek ‘satyric’ drama, the Latin ‘satirical’ poetry, are still assumed by most to have something to do with one another.

{280} [‘Dirige’ was the first word of the antiphon at matins in the Office for the Dead, taken from Psalm v, 9 (Vulg.), in which occur the words “_dirige_ in conspectu tuo vitam meam”. See Skeat, _Piers Plowman_, ii, 52. Hence also Scotch _dregy_, a dirge.]

{281} [Incorrect: the ‘mid-wife’ is etymologically she that is _with_ (old English _mid_) a woman to help her in her hour of need, like German _bei-frau_, Spanish _co-madre_, Icelandic _naer-kona_, “near-woman”, Latin _ob-stetrix_, “by-stander”, all words for the lying-in nurse. Compare German _mit-bruder_, a comrade.]

{282} “I have seen him Caper upright, like a wild _Môrisco_, Shaking the bloody darts, as he his bells”.

Shakespeare, _2 Henry VI_ Act iii, Sc. 1.

{283} In the reprinting of old books it is often very difficult to determine how far the old shape in which words present themselves should be retained, how far they should be conformed to present usage. It is comparatively easy to lay down as a rule that in books intended for popular use, wherever the form of the word is not affected by the modernizing of the spelling, as where this modernizing consists merely in the dropping of superfluous letters, there it shall take place; as who would wish our Bibles to be now printed letter for letter after the edition of 1611, or Shakespeare with the orthography of the first folio; but wherever more than the spelling, the actual shape, outline, and character of the word has been affected by the changes which it has undergone, that in all such cases the earlier form shall be held fast. The rule is a judicious one; but when it is attempted to carry it out, it is not always easy to draw the line, and to determine what affects the form and essence of a word, and what does not. About some words there can be no doubt; and therefore when a modern editor of Fuller’s _Church History_ complacently announces that he has allowed himself in such changes as ‘dirige’ into ‘dirge’, ‘barreter’ into ‘barrister’, ‘synonymas’ into ‘synonymous’, ‘extempory’ into ‘extemporary’, ‘scited’ into ‘situated’, ‘vancurrier’ into ‘avant-courier’; he at the same time informs us that for all purposes of the study of the English language (and few writers are for this more important than Fuller), he has made his edition utterly worthless. Or again, when modern editors of Shakespeare print, and that without giving any intimation of the fact,

“Like quills upon the fretful _porcupine_”,

he having written, and in his first folio and quarto the words standing,

“Like quills upon the fretful _porpentine_”,

this being the earlier, and in Shakespeare’s time the more common form of the word [e.g. “the _purpentines_ nature” (Puttenham, _Eng. Poesie_, 1589, p. 118, ed. Arber)], they must be considered as taking a very unwarrantable liberty with his text; and no less, when they substitute ‘Kenilworth’ for ‘Killingworth’, which he wrote, and which was his, Marlowe’s, and generally the earlier form of the name.

{284} [Compare Latin _amita_, yielding old French _ante_, our ‘aunt’.]

{285} “The Carthaginians shall restore and deliver back all the _renegates_ [perfugas] and fugitives that have fled to their side from us”.--p. 751.

{286} [See further in _The Folk and their Word-Lore_, p. 80.]

{287} Halbertsma quoted by Bosworth, _Origin of the English and Germanic Languages_, p. 39.

INDEX OF WORDS

PAGE Abenteuer 240 Abnormal 72 Abominable 245 Academy 70 Accommodate 107 Acre 193 Adamant 230 Admiralty 107 Advocate 82 Æon 72 Æsthetic 72 Afeard 126 Affluent 104 Afraid 127 Afterthink 120 Alcimus 237 Alcove 16 Amphibious 107 Analogie 56 Ant 253 Antecedents 210 Anthem 245 Antipodes 68 Apotheosis 67 -ard 141 Armbrust 240 Arride 58 Ascertain 186 Ask 126 Astarte 237 Attercop 123 Aurantium 241 Aurichalcum 237 Avunculize 91 Axe 126

Baffle 181 Baker, bakester 157 Banter 106 Barrier 70 Battalion 61 Bawn 123 Benefice, benefit 97 Bitesheep 144 Black art 243 Blackguard 189 Blasphemous 128 Bless 231 Bombast 199