On the Study of Words | Page 3

you are in the
habit of using or of meeting, be they such as relate to highest spiritual
things, or our common words of the shop and the market, and of all the

familiar intercourse of daily life. It will indeed repay you far better than
you can easily believe. I am sure, at least, that for many a young man
his first discovery of the fact that words are living powers, are the
vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves, has
been like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of
another sense, or the introduction into a new world; he is never able to
cease wondering at the moral marvels that surround him on every side,
and ever reveal themselves more and more to his gaze.
We indeed hear it not seldom said that ignorance is the mother of
admiration. No falser word was ever spoken, and hardly a more
mischievous one; implying, as it does, that this healthiest exercise of
the mind rests, for the most part, on a deceit and a delusion, and that
with larger knowledge it would cease; while, in truth, for once that
ignorance leads us to admire that which with fuller insight we should
perceive to be a common thing, one demanding no such tribute from us,
a hundred, nay, a thousand times, it prevents us from admiring that
which is admirable indeed. And this is so, whether we are moving in
the region of nature, which is the region of God's wonders, or in the
region of art, which is the region of man's wonders; and nowhere truer
than in this sphere and region of language, which is about to claim us
now. Oftentimes here we walk up and down in the midst of intellectual
and moral marvels with a vacant eye and a careless mind; even as some
traveller passes unmoved over fields of fame, or through cities of
ancient renown--unmoved, because utterly unconscious of the lofty
deeds which there have been wrought, of the great hearts which spent
themselves there. We, like him, wanting the knowledge and insight
which would have served to kindle admiration in us, are oftentimes
deprived of this pure and elevating excitement of the mind, and miss no
less that manifold instruction which ever lies about our path, and
nowhere more largely than in our daily words, if only we knew how to
put forth our hands and make it our own. 'What riches,' one exclaims,
'lie hidden in the vulgar tongue of our poorest and most ignorant. What
flowers of paradise lie under our feet, with their beauties and their parts
undistinguished and undiscerned, from having been daily trodden on.'
And this subject upon which we are thus entering ought not to be a dull
or uninteresting one in the handling, or one to which only by an effort
you will yield the attention which I shall claim. If it shall prove so, this

I fear must be through the fault of my manner of treating it; for
certainly in itself there is no study which may be made at once more
instructive and entertaining than the study of the use and abuse, the
origin and distinction of words, with an investigation, slight though it
may be, of the treasures contained in them; which is exactly that which
I now propose to myself and to you. I remember a very learned scholar,
to whom we owe one of our best Greek lexicons, a book which must
have cost him years, speaking in the preface of his completed work
with a just disdain of some, who complained of the irksome drudgery
of such toils as those which had engaged him so long,--toils irksome,
forsooth, because they only had to do with words. He disclaims any
part with those who asked pity for themselves, as so many galley-slaves
chained to the oar, or martyrs who had offered themselves for the good
of the literary world. He declares that the task of classing, sorting,
grouping, comparing, tracing the derivation and usage of words, had
been to him no drudgery, but a delight and labour of love. [Footnote: It
is well worth the while to read on this same subject the pleasant
causerie of Littré 'Comment j'ai fait mon Dictionnaire.' It is to be found
pp. 390-442 of his Glanures.]
And if this may be true in regard of a foreign tongue, how much truer
ought it to be in regard of our own, of our 'mother tongue,' as we
affectionately call it. A great writer not very long departed from us has
borne witness at once to the pleasantness and profit of this study. 'In a
language,' he says, 'like ours, where so many words are derived from
other languages, there are few