The Growth of Words

Radio Record, Volume IV, Issue 1, 18 July 1930, Page 16

The Growth of Words

Our Cosmopolitan Language

(By

A. B.

Chappell

MA)

HE Spelling Bee, to take place in Wellington early in August, as 2 feature of radio broadcasting, has aroused widespread interest. It is significant of a revival of an oldS|fashioned pastime, in New Zealand as elsewhere. Indeed, the spelling bee is more than a pastime. It serves a very useful end in eneouraging and fostering accuracy in written and printed speech, and though broadcasting does so much for the ear it can minister, as this instance shows, to the service of the eye. ~ In our day, words are meant for the eye as well as for the ear, and this will -be more and more so-a point overlooked by pleaders for phonetic spelling, who think mainly in terms of sound. Spelling is a modern care, which has come with the spread of education in reading even more in ld pa oa 3

writing. Our ancestors were bad spellers. There was a marked carelessness about even the spelling of what the grammarian calls proper nouns, which include personal names. Hence, the way in which Shakespearé’s mame should be spelt is to be settled by present and future usage rather than by appeal to that careless past-he was not consistently sure himself. But we need not go so’far back as Blizabethan times for an age less gifted.in spelling than our own, There was an Auckland policeman, in the days. before an education test for the fered

and street names were put up for all to read, who found one night the dead body of a lean and wasted horse in Karangahape Road, from a building in which (as you know through the 1YA announcer’s regular tale), this station now broadcasts. Obeying instructions, the policeman proceeded to make an entry in his notebook, then scratched his head in bewilderment, until, visited by an inspiration, he solved his difficulty. He dragged the exhibit round a near corner into Pitt Street and completed his official report. The pronunciation of personal names,

and even of other words, is no safe guide to spelling. People may be a law unto themselves in such a matter as their own names. Some English names, in this respect, often excite wonder. Mark Twain once made great play with this fact at a dinner in Nngland. "You have," he said, "a name that you. spell C-H O-+L-M-O-N-D-B-L-E-Y, and you call it Sinjon." That was a pal-, pable hit. However, a bishop in the company-trust these bishops !-made a telling if incomplete rejoinder: "There is, I understand, an American: whose name is spelt O-L-H-M-H-N-S, and he calls it Mark Twain." But another story comes closer home. A doctor was summoned by a note in which it was stated that a man’s wife had smallpox. He made all haste, only to find that the trouble was obviously acute rheumatism. He was quite a little angry, and showed it. "We thought it was rheumatism," apoligised the good man of the house, "but none of us could spell that." Even now, although the schoolmaster is abroad, care in spelling is far from universal. Take such examples ag. I have seen lately in manuscripts submitted for publication-"acedemic," "plentitude," "deteriation," and "philanthrophic." Even folk of relatively good education are caught out by words like "accomn. late," "deceive," "eestasy," and "stationery." In an effort to strengthen and feed the reviving interest in accurate Spelling and other due employmert — of words, I would try to show how language grows. It grows constantly in extent by the addition of words. This applies to all tongues. Take Maori. In the earliest dictionaries you will find, among Maori equivalents for English words, "tote" for salt, and "pu" for gun, in token of the engrafting of terms according to principles obtaining everywhere in the world. To our own tongue there has been constant addition. As an instance, look at "alligator." Spanish adventurers in South America called this creature "el lagarto" (the lizard), dnd in Sir Walter Raleigh’s "Discovery of Guiana" you will meet "lagartos," while Ben Jonson's "alligarta"’ reveals a step by which our "alligator" came. _Harly in the nineteenth century the word altruism had to be made from Latin to express a sentiment taking root in social philosophy, and to-day "aerobatics" and "wireless" tell in their ways the story of added words. Slang sometimes renders unintended help. In Stuart days’ the "mobile vulgus," the movable common people derided by conservative aristocrats, became contemptuously shortened to "mob," and so the word eventually became accepted. The actual time and .occasion of many additions can be found, but usually that is difficult-even impossible. Who said it first? Who wrote it first? Where was it printed first? Asa rule, .these questions cannot be answered, but there is no doubt that each new word had an originator, who either made or borrowed it. Some happy hit, a chance of fortune, was enough to introduce the eharacteristics of the stranger. It became recognised, accepted, established, to be given a place in the "Burke’s Peerage" of reputable language. Yet it was not’ thereby /

made immune from changes of fortune, for so long as a language continues to be spoken it "never continueth in one stay." Growth, you see, implies decay. Words may drop out of use. They become obsolete through neglect, and literally die, only to be discovered again as fossils, embedded in history and literature as curiosities, The spelling bee, of course, is usually limited to living words, and excludes proper names, but it is well to remember that in many living words are wrapped words of older usage and,even the names of persons. Ancient story comes ever to life in a multitude of them. ; . Curfew is the old French covrefeu (to cover fire), in thraldom is a mem~ory of the day when it was customary to thrill or drill the ear of a slave; signature goes back to the general making of a sign or mark; calculation tells of the use of calculi (pebbles) in counting; expense is reminiscent of the age when money was weighed; in the first syllable of estimate is aes, the first metal (brass) used as money by the Romans; and in other money terms, such as pecuniary, fee and rupee, there is a reminder that cattle were once employed as currency. Now we take a journey without limiting it to a day, and a journal, curiously enough, may make its appearance weekly or monthly, while our volume is no longer rolled up as of old, although the word implies that. A little thought about these things leads to recognition of the wrong often done when etymology is turned into an argument for meaning. "Time makes ancient good uncouth," and _ that ground is dangerous. But thought is often clarified and much enriched by knowledge of the origins of words, and spelling-bee enthusiasts will get immense help from this. The smith once had to smite often and strenuously; our candidates do not wear a white toga in announce-

ment of the purity of their motives, but it was so in old Rome; trivial things naturally formed the staple of conversation of loiterers where three crossroads met; the pagan was once the man of the distant village, outside the city’s culture; the heathen was he whose home was amid the wild heaths; a miscreant was once, as the word

tells, a misbeliever, before’ he was thereupon held to be a rascal. We fret, forgetting that the word literally means to eat away; it comes from a telescoping in of "for-eat," where the first half is an ancient English particle of privative force. There is a good deal to be said for Jean Paul’s description of many words as faded metaphors. In our tribulation is the old Roman flail, the tribulum; desultory gives us a picture of leaping from crag to crag; and our caprice embalms the like habit of the goat whose Latin eaper goes on down the years. In many of our most familiar flower-names there are beautiful metaphors. I leave you to think of them. English has borrowed much-more than it has repaid or been able to repay. This seems to have given us a

useless multpilying of words. In reality, it has enriched and developed our thought. Here is a whole family of words, though their family likeness is only in meaning: trick, device, finesse, artifice, stratagem. The first is Old English; the second we took from Italian, the third from Frerich, the fourth from Latin, the last from Greek. But, though they fundamentally mean the same thing, we have employed a uséful process of discrimination, putting each word to a specialised use. Have we not well invested what we have borrowed? We now distinguish hearer and auditor, unreadable and illegible, love and charity; and, while both meet. in their adjective pastoral, we do not mean the same thing by our native shepherd and our imported pastor. Think again of the words that come from proper names. An atlas speaks of the mythical giant supporting our world; an epicure is one whose tastes recall, though from a somewhat misleading distance, the pleasant philosophy of Dpicurus; academy goes back to Plato’s grove and so to the name of a monarch; in a philippic we have such a discourse as Demosthenes once hurled across Philip of Macedon, the archenemy ef Greece; Cicero lives in every eicerone; a Lazarus of old, smitten with leprosy, originated our lazaretto; from Simon Magus ("thy'money perish with thee!’) is got our simony, with a difference; Mausolus, a king of ancient Caria, is the maker of all, our mausoleums; our dunces may be: comforted to know that they descend from Duns Scotus, the famous schoolman; a negro sorcerer of Surinam has his name preserved in quassia ; a physician, Dr. Nicot, introducing the soothing tobacco-plant to HBurope, brought us nicotine;.a colonel of Queen Anne’s dead day first mixed our negus, and we use his name with. every. mention of the hot stimulant; whether we prefer a mackintosh or a spencer, we must

needs recall him who brought either into fashion; we should thank a certain nobleman every time we eat a sandwich, and a celebrated French dealer when we see a doyly, though our American cousins, prone to take liberties in commerce, have by a change ,of spelling done his memory injustice; when we come across macddam we should recall the. pioneering road engineer of: that late eighteenth century which was in sore need of his: service; to mesmerise we are verbally dependent on a Viennese scientist of the same age; and, to make a steep descent to sordid things, an infamous murderer taught us how to burke a question. Recovering, we find many a botanist in a flower. To be quixotic is to emulate a very valorous but incompetent Spanish knight. Dean Swift gave us lilliputian and brobdingnagian. of which contestants in the spelling bee will do well to take care. Whole peoples have poured words into our store. Frank comes from an ancient Germanic tribe whose’ name is still seen in France and in franchise; against that, slaves inherit from a Byzantine name of a Slavic horde, In America is perpetuated Amerigo Vespucci, who once had the credit of discovery held by Columbus. As td places, they have blessed us with damask, muslin, calico, muscatels, to} baeco, and many another boon, ag words witness. it On the other hand, inanimate thingy and observed qualities have bestowe names on people. So came the Whites, Browns, Greys and even the Greens. Typical of many, we hayé. the Strongs, especially the Armstrongs, and here and there a_ Strongitharmi. This naming by qualities is old, very old. You find it in earliest Biblical times. It survives in such livin; tongues as Maori. Occupations appear at christenings, as witness the (Concluded on page 41.)

Growth of Words (Concluded from page 17.) Smiths, Carpenters, Taylors, Carters, Brewers, Butchers (with whom the Fleshers keep company, though the Fletchers were once makers of bows and arrows). ‘These workpeople are nominally a great host. In the growth within words meaning is apt to become smothered, and this ye of verbal change has raised about the difficulty of Hnglish spelling and pleas for phonetic spelling. But at bottom these com- _ plaints and pleas are tokens of lazi- . ness; more, they betray a lack of appreciation of the things of the mind. A little education may be needful to : appreciate the history in "chandelier" and its relation to "chandler," or to connect "cerise’" with a cherry and an "apricot" with an apple, but no highbrow skill is wanted to sense the poetry in "daisy" as the day’s eye. Some are ready to throw all such things away, none more than those who would have a universal language all others and have it spelt on rigid phonetic lines. These vandals are doing mischief. Meaning to encourage international fraternity, they treat as rubbish the manifold, wonderful links between peoples fashioned by the mutual borrowing of ‘words and symbols.

: In words is an educational. apparatus of great value-the commonest and the cheapest, always at hand, but ready for every need. Those interested in the spelling bee are’ dealing with a great inheritance; there is none greater in the world. To them all, whether contestants or listeners, I. pass on the cordial wish-Good hunting!