On the Study of Words | Page 4

modes of instruction more useful or
more amusing than that of accustoming young people to seek for the
etymology or primary meaning of the words they use. There are cases
in which more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the
history of a word than by the history of a campaign.' So writes
Coleridge; and impressing the same truth, Emerson has somewhere
characterized language as 'fossil poetry.' He evidently means that just
as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal
life, the graceful fern or the finely vertebrated lizard, such as now, it
may be, have been extinct for thousands of years, are permanently
bound up with the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would
else have been their portion,--so in words are beautiful thoughts and
images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since

in their graves, of men whose very names have perished, there are these,
which might so easily have perished too, preserved and made safe for
ever. The phrase is a striking one; the only fault one can find with it is
that it is too narrow. Language may be, and indeed is, this 'fossil poetry';
but it may be affirmed of it with exactly the same truth that it is fossil
ethics, or fossil history. Words quite as often and as effectually embody
facts of history, or convictions of the moral sense, as of the imagination
or passion of men; even as, so far as that moral sense may be perverted,
they will bear witness and keep a record of that perversion. On all these
points I shall enter at full in after lectures; but I may give by
anticipation a specimen or two of what I mean, to make from the first
my purpose and plan more fully intelligible to all.
Language then is 'fossil poetry'; in other words, we are not to look for
the poetry which a people may possess only in its poems, or its poetical
customs, traditions, and beliefs. Many a single word also is itself a
concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid
up in it. Examine it, and it will be found to rest on some deep analogy
of things natural and things spiritual; bringing those to illustrate and to
give an abiding form and body to these. The image may have grown
trite and ordinary now: perhaps through the help of this very word may
have become so entirely the heritage of all, as to seem little better than
a commonplace; yet not the less he who first discerned the relation, and
devised the new word which should express it, or gave to an old, never
before but literally used, this new and figurative sense, this man was in
his degree a poet--a maker, that is, of things which were not before,
which would not have existed but for him, or for some other gifted with
equal powers. He who spake first of a 'dilapidated' fortune, what an
image must have risen up before his mind's eye of some falling house
or palace, stone detaching itself from stone, till all had gradually sunk
into desolation and ruin. Or he who to that Greek word which signifies
'that which will endure to be held up to and judged by the sunlight,'
gave first its ethical signification of 'sincere,' 'truthful,' or as we
sometimes say, 'transparent,' can we deny to him the poet's feeling and
eye? Many a man had gazed, we are sure, at the jagged and indented
mountain ridges of Spain, before one called them 'sierras' or 'saws,' the
name by which now they are known, as Sierra Morena, Sierra Nevada;
but that man coined his imagination into a word which will endure as

long as the everlasting hills which he named.
But it was said just now that words often contain a witness for great
moral truths--God having pressed such a seal of truth upon language,
that men are continually uttering deeper things than they know,
asserting mighty principles, it may be asserting them against
themselves, in words that to them may seem nothing more than the
current coin of society. Thus to what grand moral purposes Bishop
Butler turns the word 'pastime'; how solemn the testimony which he
compels the world, out of its own use of this word, to render against
itself--obliging it to own that its amusements and pleasures do not
really satisfy the mind and fill it with the sense of an abiding and
satisfying joy: [Footnote: Sermon xiv. Upon the Love of God. Curiously
enough, Montaigne has, in his Essays, drawn the same testimony out of
the word: 'This ordinary phrase of Pass-time, and passing away the time,
represents the custom of those wise sort of people, who think