The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

Words, Words, Words!

"Words are the daughters of earth" (Indian saying.)

Sir William Jones.

"Dawdling over a dictionary," says an American writer on education, "is the only place I know where dawdling reaps a good harvest."

Most people will agree that it is a good thing to enlarge one's choice of words, both to express oneself more easily, and to gain the attention of one's hearers. In that clever novel, With Edged Tools, Merriman (alas! the late) has his say about commonplace diction:--"'Well, put it that way if you like,' 'Thanks, I do prefer it. Any fool could call a spade a spade. The natural ambition would be to find something more flowery, and yet equally descriptive.'" A good choice of adjectives often imprints a picture on the mind's eye, where more normal words would give no grip whatever. "Such aggressive love-making," murmured an indignant old bachelor, in disgust at seeing a young engaged couple showing their feelings too openly. Matthew Arnold's advice to catch the contagion of getting on is a happy phrase, as it implies the handing on of what has been taken. The Bishop of London, once with a delightful discrimination of words, when asked if a sermon was done, replied, "It is over; it has got to be done."

Dates can be much studies in a dictionary. The Nuttall I have by me being published in 1899, gives no place to Appendicitis, not is Bridge mentioned as a game, and benignant only means kind and gracious, not as it was used lately to describe the throat of the Emperor of Germany, as opposed to malignant. Malignant is a word which has had various meanings, as used in astrology, as the Puritan name for Cavalier, and at the present time in reference to tumours.

It is difficult to know when and why a stand word ceases to be such, and becomes incorporated into a language. It almost seems to resemble the questionable luxury of one generation becoming the unquestioned necessity of the next. Dictionaries do not seem much guide in this matter. Both Ogilvie and Nuttall give Peeler as a popular name for policeman, and in both Bobby is conspicuous by absence. Ogilvie describes slang as low, vulgar, unmeaning language; Nuttall more lengthily puts it as "conversational expression of an irregular, more or less vulgar, type, familiar to, and in vogue among, a class."

A Gladstone is not mentioned, but other names fossilized in substantives are, such as guillotine, sandwich, hansom, spencer; Wellingtons are according to Nuttall "long-legged boots," but Ogilvie's description is "a kind of short boot"! Dictionaries disagree as well as other D's, and Ogilvie may have been fisherman.

Peewit finds no place in the dictionary, because like the teru-tero in South America, it takes its name from the sound of its voice, and so can only be found as a local or vulgar term for plover, or lapwing.

Alliteration, together with the use of an old, almost forgotten word, strikes a note easily remembered, as in the line--

"In public toil and private teen." (Matthew Arnold)

D'Israeli knew the value of the former, and indeed adopted it so frequently as to be at one time known as the alliterative Dizzy, in allusion to the hurried Hudson, Dauby in his Dungeon, etc.

The later political party names, Conservative, Liberal, Radical, Unionist, Free-fooders, have the virtue of being easily accounted for, and no need of, like Tory and Whig, being traced back to Irish robbers or Scotch cattle-lifters. Ireland of 1880 reminds us how the term Boycott came into being, an adjective as much associated with one special man as Lynch is with the Virginian farmer, or Silhouette--for a cheap black paper portrait, is with the too economical French Minister of finance.

It is a side-light on the progress of Church feeling that in older dictionaries many things are described as Roman Catholic which in modern ones lose that designation, viz., fasting, penance, &c. The word attrition is, in Nuttall, "penitence arising only from fear of punishment," but according to Ogilvie, "with Roman Catholic divines, grief for sin arising only from fear of punishment; the lowest degree of repentance."

It chanced to me last autumn to see an interesting case of self-education by dictionary! An East London factory girl out of work, took a temporary place of three months as servant in a sea-side home for girls, where part of her work was to wait on the lady-superintendents. To the amusement of her companions she took with her a Nuttall's dictionary. She waited at table excellently, and never appeared to be listening to the conversation, but nevertheless every word she did not comprehend she looked out at her first leisure moment, even on two or three occasions when they were Latin quotations! She was taken with the other girls as a treat to see a neighbouring Cathedral, and gathered up all the verger's words and descriptions, and picked them out in her beloved dictionary. The habit seems to have sharpened all her wits, her memory is wonderfully quick, her choice of words quite differentiates her from her companions to any observer, and she is altogether on a higher, more cultivated plane. Her dictionary has been to her a first-rate continuation school, or, more correctly, a miniature University.

Typed by Nicole Robinson, June, 2024