The Study of Words by Richard Chenevix Trench

Author:Richard Chenevix Trench
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, philology, literature, word, words, study, studies, literary, linguistics
ISBN: 9781781669358
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2012
Published: 2012-06-21T00:00:00+00:00

LECTURE V.

ON THE RISE OF NEW WORDS.

If I do not much mistake, you will find it not a little interesting to follow great and significant words to the time and place of their birth. And not these alone. The same interest, though perhaps not in so high a degree, will cleave to the upcoming of words not a few that have never played a part so important in the world's story. A volume might be written such as few would rival in curious interest, which should do no more than indicate the occasion upon which new words, or old words employed in a new sense - being such words as the world subsequently heard much of - first appeared; with quotation, where advisable, of the passages in proof. A great English poet, too early lost, 'the young Marcellus of our tongue,' as Dryden so finely calls him, has very grandly described the emotion of

'some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken.'

Not very different will be our feeling, as we watch, at the moment of its rising above the horizon, some word destined, it may be, to play its part in the world's story, to take its place for ever among the luminaries in the moral and intellectual firmament above us.

But a caution is necessary here. We must not regard as certain in every case, or indeed in most cases, that the first rise of a word will have exactly consented in time with its first appearance within the range of our vision. Such identity will sometimes exist; and we may watch i the actual birth of some word, and may affirm with confidence that at such a time and on such an occasion it first saw the light - in this book, or from the lips of that man. Of another we can only say, About this time and near about this spot it first came into being, for we first meet it in such an author and under such and such conditions. So mere a fragment of ancient literature has come down to us, that, while the earliest appearance there of a word is still most instructive to note, it cannot in all or in nearly all cases be affirmed to mark the exact moment of its nativity. And even in the modern world we must in most instances be content to fix a period, we may perhaps add a local habitation, within the limits of which the term must have been born, either in legitimate scientific travail, or the child of some flash of genius, or the product of some generatio aequivoca, the necessary result of exciting predisposing causes; at the same time seeking by further research ever to narrow more and more the limits within which this must have happened.

To speak first of words religious and ecclesiastical. Very noteworthy, and in some sort epoch-making, must be regarded the first appearance of the following: - 'Christian'; [Footnote: Acts xi. 26.] 'Trinity'; [Footnote: Tertullian, Adv.

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