English Past and Present Part 6

{55} [The ident.i.ty of these two words, notwithstanding the a.n.a.logy of _corona_ and _crown_, is denied by Skeat, Kluge and Lutz.]

{56} Skinner (_Etymologicon_, 1671) protests against the word altogether, as purely French, and having no right to be considered English at all.

{57} It is curious how effectually the nationality of a word may by these slight alterations in spelling be disguised. I have met an excellent French and English scholar, to whom it was quite a surprise to learn that 'redingote' was 'riding-coat'.

{58} [Compare French _marsouin_ (=German _meer-schwein_), "sea-pig", the dolphin; Breton _mor-houc'h_; Irish _mucc mara_, "pig of the sea", the dolphin (W. Stokes, _Irish Glossaries_, p. 118); French _truye de mer_ (Cotgrave); old English _brun-swyne_ (_Prompt. Parv._), "brown-pig", the dolphin or seal.]

{59} He is not indeed perfectly accurate in this statement, for the Greeks spoke of ?? ????? pa?de?a and ????????? pa?de?a, but had no such composite word as ???????pade?a. We gather however from these expressions, as from Lord Bacon's using the term 'circle-learning'

(='orbis doctrinae', Quintilian), that 'encyclopaedia' did not exist in their time. [But 'encyclopedia' occurs in Elyot, _Governour_, 1531, vol. i, p. 118 (ed. Croft); 'encyclopaedie' in J. Sylvester, _Workes_, 1621, p. 660.]

{60} See the pa.s.sages quoted in my paper, _On some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries_, p. 38.

{61} [This prediction has been verified. 'Ethos' is used by Sir F.

Palgrave, 1851, and in the 'Encyclopaedia Britannica', 1875. N.E.D.]

{62} We may see the same progress in Greek words which were being incorporated in the Latin. Thus Cicero writes ??t?p?de? (_Acad._ ii, 39, 123), but Seneca (_Ep._ 122), 'antipodes'; that is, the word for Cicero was still Greek, while in the period that elapsed between him and Seneca, it had become Latin: so too Cicero wrote e?d????, the Younger Pliny 'idolon', and Tertullian 'idolum'.

{63} [This rash prophecy has not been fulfilled. English speakers are still no more inclined to say 'prestige' than 'police'.]

{64} See in Coleridge's _Table Talk_, p. 3, the amusing story of John Kemble's stately correction of the Prince of Wales for adhering to the earlier p.r.o.nunciation, 'obl_ee_ge,'--"It will become your royal mouth better to say obl_i_ge."

{65} "In this great _academy_ of mankind".

Butler, _To the Memory of Du Val_.

{66} "'Twixt that and reason what a nice _barrier_".

{67} [A fairly complete collection of these and similar semi-naturalized foreign words will be found in _The Stanford Dictionary of Anglicized Words_, edited by Dr. C. A. M. Fennell, 1892.]

{68} [This is quite wrong. Mr. Fitzedward Hall shows that 'inimical' was used by Gaule in 1652, as well as by Richardson in 1758 (_Modern English_, p. 287). The N.E.D. quotes an instance of it from Udall in 1643.]

{69} [The word had been already naturalized by H. More, 1647, Cudworth, 1678, Tucker 1765, and Carlyle, 1831.--N.E.D.]

{70} [The earliest citation for 'abnormal' in the N.E.D. is dated 1835.

The older word was 'abnormous'. Curious to say it is unrelated to 'normal' to which it has been a.s.similated, being merely an alteration of 'anomal-ous'.]

{71} [Fuller says of 'plunder', "we first heard thereof in the Swedish wars", and that it came into England about 1642 (_Church History_, bk. xi, sec. 4, par. 33). It certainly occurs under that date in _Memoirs of the Verney Family_, "It is in danger of _plonderin_"

(vol. i, p. 71, also p. 151). It also occurs in a doc.u.ment dated 1643, "We must _plunder_ none but Roundheads" (_Camden Soc.

Miscellany_, iii, 31). Drummond (died 1649) has "Go fight and _plunder_" (_Poems_, ed. Turnbull, p. 330). It appears in a quotation from _The Bellman of London_ (no reference) given in Timbs, _London and Westminster_, vol. i, p. 254.]

{72} [It is rather from the old Dutch _trecker_, a 'puller'. Very few English words come to us from German.]

{73} [So Skeat, _Etym. Dict._ But the Germans themselves take their _schwindler_ (in the sense of cheat) to have been adopted from the English 'swindler'. Dr. Dunger a.s.serts that it was introduced into their language by Lichtenberg in his explanation of Hogarth's engravings, 1794-99 (_Englanderei in der Deutschen Sprache_, 1899, p. 7).]

{74} _Pisgah Sight of Palestine_, 1650, p. 217.

{75} [This word introduced as a 'pure neologism' by D'Israeli (_Curiosities of Literature_, 1839, 11th ed. p. 384) as a companion to 'mother-tongue', had been already used by Sir W. Temple in 1672 (Hall, _Mod. English_, p. 44). Nay, even by Tyndale, see T. L. K.

Oliphant, _The New English_, i, 439.]

{76} ['Folk-lore' was introduced by Mr. W. J. Thoms, editor of _Notes and Queries_, in 1846. Still later came 'Folk-etymology', the earliest use of which in N.E.D. is given as 1883, but the editor's work bearing that t.i.tle appeared in 1882.]

{77} _Holy State_, b. 2, c. 6. There was a time when the Latin promised to display, if not an equal, yet not a very inferior, freedom in this forming of new words by the happy marriage of old. But in this, as in so many respects, it seemed possessed at the period of its highest culture with a timidity, which caused it voluntarily to abdicate many of its own powers. Where do we find in the Augustan period of the language so grand a pair of epithets as these, occurring as they do in a single line of Catullus: Ubi cerva _silvicultrix_, ubi aper _nemorivagus_? or again, as his 'fluentisonus'? Virgil's vitisator (_aen._ 7, 179) is not his own, but derived from one of the earlier poets. Nay, the language did not even retain those compound epithets which it once had formed, but was content to let numbers of them drop: 'parcipromus'; 'turpilucricupidus', and many more, do not extend beyond Plautus. On this matter Quintilian observes (i. 5, 70): Res tota magis Graecos decet, n.o.bis minus succedit; nec id fieri natura puto, sed alienis favemus; ideoque c.u.m ???ta??e?a mirati sumus, _incurvicervic.u.m_ vix a risu defendimus. Elsewhere he complains, though not with reference to compound epithets, of the little _generative_ power which existed in the Latin language, that its continual losses were compensated by no equivalent gains (viii. 6, 32): Deinde, tanquum consummata sint omnia, nihil generare audemus ipsi, quum multa quotidie ab antiquis ficta moriantur. Notwithstanding this complaint, it must be owned that the silver age of the language, which sought to recover, and did recover to some extent the abdicated energies of its earlier times, rea.s.serted among other powers that of combining words with a certain measure of success.

{78} [For Shakespearian compounds see Abbott's _Shakespearian Grammar_, pp. 317-20.]

{79} [Writing in the year 1780 Bentham says: "The word it must be acknowledged is a new one".]

{80} _Collection of Scarce Tracts_, edited by Sir W. Scott, vol. vii, p.

91.

{81} [Hardly a novelty, as the word occurs in J. Gaule, ???-a?t?a, 1652, p. 30. See F. Hall, _Mod. English_, p. 131.]

{82} [First used apparently by Grote, 1847, and Mrs. Gaskell, 1857, N.E.D.]

{83} See _Letters of Horace Walpole and Mann_, vol. ii. p. 396, quoted in _Notes and Queries_, No. 225; and another proof of the novelty of the word in Pegge's _Anecdotes of the English Language_, 1814, p. 38.

{84} Postscript to his _Translation of the aeneid_.

{85} Multa renascentur, quae jam cecidere.

_De A. P._ 46-72; cf. _Ep._ 2, 2, 115.

{86} _Etymologicon voc.u.m omnium antiquarum quae usque a Wilhelmo Victore invaluerunt, et jam ante parentum aetatem in usu esse desierunt._

{87} [As a matter of fact the N.E.D. fails to give any quotation for this word in the period named.]

{88} [The verb 'to advocate' had long before been employed by Nash, 1598, Sanderson, 1624, and Heylin, 1657 (F. Hall, _Mod. English_, p. 285).]

{89} In like manner La Bruyere, in his _Caracteres_, c. 14, laments the extinction of a large number of French words which he names. At least half of these have now free course in the language, as 'valeureux', 'haineux', 'peineux', 'fructueux', 'mensonger', 'coutumier', 'vantard', 'courtois', 'jovial', 'fetoyer', 'larmoyer', 'verdoyer'. Two or three of these may be rarely used, but every one would be found in a dictionary of the living language.

{90} _Preface to Juvenal._

{91} _Preface to Troilus and Cressida._ In justice to Dryden, and lest it should be said that he had spoken poetic blasphemy, it ought not to be forgotten that 'pestered' had not in his time at all so offensive a sense as it would have now. It meant no more than inconveniently crowded; thus Milton: "Confined and _pestered_ in this pinfold here".

{92} Thus in North's _Plutarch_, p. 499: "After the fire was quenched, they found in _niggots_ of gold and silver mingled together, about a thousand talents"; and again, p. 323: "There was brought a marvellous great ma.s.s of treasure in _niggots_ of gold". The word has not found its way into our dictionaries or glossaries.

{93} ['Niggot' rather stands for 'ningot', due to a coalescence of the article in 'an ingot' (as if 'a ningot'); just as, according to some, in French _l'ingot_ became _lingot_.]

{94} [Such collections were essayed in J. C. Hare's _Two Essays in English Philology_, 1873, "_Words derived from Names of Persons_", and in R. S. Charnock's _Verba Nominalia_, pp. 326.]

{95} [In a strangely similar way the stone-worshipper in the Malay Peninsula gives to his sacred boulder the t.i.tle of Mohammed (Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, 3rd ed. ii. 254).]

{96} [But Wolsey's jester was most probably so called from his wearing a varicoloured or patchwork coat; compare the Shakespearian use of 'motley'. Similarly the _maquereaux_ of the old French comedy were clothed in a mottled dress like our harlequin, just as the Latin _maccus_ or mime wore a _centunculus_ or patchwork coat, his name being perhaps connected with _macus_ (in _macula_), a spot (Gozzi, _Memoirs_, i, 38). In stage slang the harlequin was called _patchy_, as his Latin counterpart was _centunculus_.]

{97} [An error. Prof. Skeat shows that 'tram' was an old word in Scottish and Northern English (_Etym. Dict._, 655 and 831).]

{98} Several of these we have in common with the French. Of their own they have 'sardanapalisme', any piece of profuse luxury, from Sardanapalus; while for 'lambiner', to dally or loiter over a task, they are indebted to Denis Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the sixteenth century, whom his adversaries accused of sluggish movement and wearisome diffuseness in style. Every reader of Pascal's _Provincial Letters_ will remember Escobar, the great casuist among the Jesuits, whose convenient subterfuges for the relaxation of the moral law have there been made famous. To the notoriety which he thus acquired he owes his introduction into the French language; where 'escobarder' is used in the sense of to equivocate, and 'escobarderie' of subterfuge or equivocation. The name of an unpopular minister of finance, M. de Silhouette, unpopular because he sought to cut down unnecessary expenses in the state, was applied to whatever was cheap, and, as was implied, unduly economical; it has survived in the black outline portrait which is now called a 'silhouette'. (Sismondi, _Histoire des Francais_, tom. xix, pp. 94, 95.) In the 'mansarde' roof we have the name of Mansart, the architect who introduced it. I need hardly add 'guillotine'.