The question, however, is not about the general educational value of classical studies, but whether they are indispensable to him who would write or speak English with the highest force, elegance, and accuracy. I think they are not. In the first place, I deny that a knowledge of the etymologies of words,--of their meanings a hundred or five hundred years ago,--is essential to their proper use now. How am I aided in the use of the word “villain” by knowing that it once meant peasant,--in the use of “wince” by knowing that it meant kick,--in the use of “brat,” “beldam,” and “pedant,” by knowing that they meant, respectively, child, fine lady, and tutor,--in the use of “meddle,” by knowing that formerly it had no offensive meaning, and that one could meddle even with his own affairs? Am I more or less likely to use “ringleader” correctly to-day, from learning that Christ is correctly spoken of by an old divine as “the ringleader of our salvation”? Shall I be helped in the employment of the word “musket” by knowing that it was once the name of a small hawk, or fly, or in the use of the word “tragedy” by knowing that it is connected in some way with the Greek word for a goat? Facts like these are of deep interest to all, and of high value to the scholar; but how is the knowledge of them necessary that one may speak or write well?
The question with the man who addresses his fellow-man by tongue or pen to-day, is not what ought to be, or formerly was, the meaning of a word, but, what is it _now_? Indeed, it may be doubted whether a reference to the roots and derivations,--the old original meanings of words,--which have grown obsolete by the fluctuations of manners, customs, and a thousand other causes, does not, as Archbishop Whately insists, tend to confusion, and prove rather a hindrance than a help to the correct use of our tongue. Words not only, for the most part, ride very slackly at anchor on their etymologies, borne, as they are, hither and thither by the shifting tides and currents of usage, but they often break away from their moorings altogether. The knowledge of a man’s antecedents may help us sometimes to estimate his present self: but the knowledge of what a word meant three or twenty centuries ago may only mislead us as to its meaning now. Spenser uses the word “edify” in the sense of “to build”; but would any one speak of a house being edified to-day? “Symbol” and “conjecture” are words that etymologically have precisely the same signification; and the same is true of “hypostasis,” “substance,” and “understanding,” derived respectively from the Greek, Latin, and Saxon; yet have either the two former, or the three latter words, as they are now used, the least similarity of meaning? Is it desirable to call a suffering man a “passionate” man,--to say with Bishop Lowth that “the Emperor Julian very ‘judiciously’ planned the overthrow of Christianity,”--to speak with Paley of the “judiciousness” of God,--and with Guizot of the “duplicity” of certain plays of Shakespeare (meaning their dual structure),--merely because we find these significations lying at the remote and dead roots of the words which we now employ in wholly different significations? The effect of a constant reference to etymology, in the use of words, is seen in the writings of Milton, whose use of “elate” for “lifted on high,” “implicit” for “entangled,” “succinct” for “girded,” “spirited” for “inspired,” and hundreds of other such perversions of language, may please the scholar who loves to crack philological nuts, but is fitted only to perplex, confound, and mislead the ordinary reader. It is seen still more plainly in the writings of Donne, Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, who not only imported Latin words by wholesale into the language, only giving them an anglicized form and termination, but sometimes employed in a new sense words already adopted into English, and used in their original sense. Thus Taylor uses “immured” for “encompassed,” “irritation” for “making void”; and in referring to “the bruising of the serpent’s head,” he ludicrously speaks of the “‘contrition’ of the serpent.” Again, he uses the word “excellent” for “surpassing,” and even perverts the meaning of the word so far as to speak of “an ‘excellent’ pain!”
