A late writer calls attention to the fact that the French language, while it has such positive expressions as “drunk” and “tipsy,” conveyed by _ivre_ and _gris_, contains no such negative term as “sober.” _Sobre_ means always “temperate” or “abstemious,” never the opposite condition to intoxication. The English, it is argued, drink enough to need a special illustrative title for a man who has not drunk; but though the Parisians began to drink alcohol freely during the sieges, the French have never yet felt the necessity of forming any such curious subjective appellation, consequently they do not possess it. Again, the French boast that they have no such word as “bribe,” as if this implied their exemption from that sin; and such, indeed, may be the fact. But may not the absence of this word from their vocabulary prove, on the contrary, their lack of sensibility to the heinous nature of the offense, just as the lack of the word “humility,” in the language of the Greeks, usually so rich in terms, proves that they lacked the thing itself, or as the fact that the same people had no word corresponding to the Latin _ineptus_, argues, as Cicero thought, not that the character designated by the word was wanting among them, but that the fault was so universal with them that they failed to recognize it as such? Is it not a great defect in a language that it lacks the words by which certain forms of baseness or sinfulness, in those who speak it, may be brought home to their consciousness? Can we properly hate or abhor any wicked act till we have given it a specific objective existence by giving it a name which shall at once designate and condemn it? The _pot-de-vin_, and other jesting phrases which the French have coined to denote bribery, can have no effect but to encourage this wrong.
What shall we think of the fact that the French language has no word equivalent to “listener”? Is it not a noteworthy circumstance, shedding light upon national character, that among thirty-seven millions of talkers, no provision, except the awkward paraphrase, _celui qui écoute_, “he who hears,” should have been made for hearers? Is there any other explanation of this blank than the supposition that every Frenchman talks from the pure love of talking, and not to be heard; that, reversing the proverb, he believes that silence is silver, but talking is golden; and that, not caring whether he is listened to or not, he has never recognized that he has no name for the person to whom he chatters? Again, is it not remarkable that, among the French, _bonhomme_, “a good man,” is a term of contempt; that the fearful Hebrew word, “gehenna,” has been condensed into _gêne_, and means only a petty annoyance; and that _honnêteté_, which once meant honesty, now means only civility? It was in the latter half of the reign of Louis XIV that the word _honnête_ exchanged its primitive for its present meaning. Till then, according to good authority, when a man’s descent was said to be _honnête_, he was complimented on the virtuousness of his progenitors, not reminded of the mediocrity of their condition; and when the same term was applied to his family, it was an acknowledgment that they belonged to the middle ranks of society, not a suggestion that they were plebeians. Again, how significant is the fact that the French has no such words as “home,” “comfort,” “spiritual,” and but one word for “love” and “like,” compelling them to put Heaven’s last gift to man on a par with an article of diet; as “I love Julia,”--“I love a leg of mutton”! Couple with these peculiarities of the language the circumstance that the French term _spirituel_ means simply witty, with a certain quickness, delicacy, and versatility of mind, and have you not a real insight into the national character?