A profusion of words used in an ephemeral slang sense is evidence, then, that the writer addresses himself merely to the uneducated and thoughtless of his own day; the revival of bygone meanings, on the other hand, and an archaic turn given to language is the mark rather of authors who are ambitious of a hearing from more than one age.The accretions of time bring round a word many reputable meanings, of which the oldest is like to be the deepest in grain.
It is a counsel of perfection - some will say, of vainglorious pedantry - but that shaft flies furthest which is drawn to the head, and he who desires to be understood in the twenty-fourth century will not be careless of the meanings that his words inherit from the fourteenth.To know them is of service, if only for the piquancy of avoiding them.But many times they cannot wisely be avoided, and the auspices under which a word began its career when first it was imported from the French or Latin overshadow it and haunt it to the end.
Popular modern usage will often rob common words, like "nice,""quaint," or "silly," of all flavour of their origin, as if it were of no moment to remember that these three words, at the outset of their history, bore the older senses of "ignorant," "noted," and "blessed." It may be granted that any attempt to return to these older senses, regardless of later implications, is stark pedantry;but a delicate writer will play shyly with the primitive significance in passing, approaching it and circling it, taking it as a point of reference or departure.The early faith of Christianity, its beautiful cult of childhood, and its appeal to unlearned simplicity, have left their mark on the meaning of "silly"; the history of the word is contained in that cry of St.
Augustine, INDOCTI SURGUNT ET RAPIUNT COELUM, or in the fervent sentence of the author of the IMITATION, OPORTET FIERI STULTUM.
And if there is a later silliness, altogether unblest, the skilful artificer of words, while accepting this last extension, will show himself conscious of his paradox.So also he will shun the grossness that employs the epithet "quaint" to put upon subtlety and the devices of a studied workmanship an imputation of eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this regard, he will be careful to justify his innuendo.The slipshod use of "nice" to connote any sort of pleasurable emotion he will take care, in his writings at least, utterly to abhor.From the daintiness of elegance to the arrogant disgust of folly the word carries meanings numerous and diverse enough; it must not be cruelly burdened with all the laudatory occasions of an undiscriminating egotism.
It would be easy to cite a hundred other words like these, saved only by their nobler uses in literature from ultimate defacement.
The higher standard imposed upon the written word tends to raise and purify speech also, and since talkers owe the same debt to writers of prose that these, for their part, owe to poets, it is the poets who must be accounted chief protectors, in the last resort, of our common inheritance.Every page of the works of that great exemplar of diction, Milton, is crowded with examples of felicitous and exquisite meaning given to the infallible word.
Sometimes he accepts the secondary and more usual meaning of a word only to enrich it by the interweaving of the primary and etymological meaning.Thus the seraph Abdiel, in the passage that narrates his offer of combat to Satan, is said to "explore" his own undaunted heart, and there is no sense of "explore" that does not heighten the description and help the thought.Thus again, when the poet describes those Eremites and friars, White, Black, and Gray, with all their trumpery, who inhabit, or are doomed to inhabit, the Paradise of Fools, he seems to invite the curious reader to recall the derivation of "trumpery," and so supplement the idea of worthlessness with that other idea, equally grateful to the author, of deceit.The strength that extracts this multiplex resonance of meaning from a single note is matched by the grace that gives to Latin words like "secure," "arrive," "obsequious," "redound," "infest," and "solemn"the fine precision of intent that art can borrow from scholarship.
Such an exactitude is consistent with vital change; Milton himself is bold to write "stood praying" for "continued kneeling in prayer," and deft to transfer the application of "schism" from the rent garment of the Church to those necessary "dissections made in the quarry and in the timber ere the house of God can be built."Words may safely veer to every wind that blows, so they keep within hail of their cardinal meanings, and drift not beyond the scope of their central employ, but when once they lose hold of that, then, indeed, the anchor has begun to drag, and the beach-comber may expect his harvest.
