Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/374

66 contains several instances of this process. Take the word geometry, for instance; no one who has learnt the subject can mistake the meaning; so long as there are people acquainted with both, so are form and sense preserved intact generation after generation; tradition helps our memories by making us understand. But let the word fail among rustics to whom that classical tradition and scientific experience are unknown, and it straightway becomes adapted to the ear and the knowledge of country folk; it is spelt jommetry and means magic. In this new form and sense it becomes stable, because it is in harmony with the traditions of its new home. The knowledge of a few keeps the word polyanthus from going astray among the educated classes; but when it reaches people who are not under the influence of those few it becomes Polly-Andrews or anything that is in keeping with the English language and English ideas; in the same way bronchitis becomes brown-typhus to those who have never heard of bronchia. Sometimes a word is kept unaltered by sheer effort of memory, no one being able to account for the outlandish form, or not enough people to affect even the cultivated class; shame alone preserves the word, everyone fearing to lose caste by mispronouncing or misspelling; thus it is with the word asparagus; it would be more picturesque and more interesting, and it would economise our memories, if we could call it "sparrow-grass," but we dare not for fear of being assigned to the lower classes.

The reason for these changes is that words, like all other ideas, cannot live in isolation, but only as parts of a system. They must conform in sound and in sense with the general spirit of the language; if they do not they tend to perish; they must conform in order to survive. If, therefore, a word for some reason or other breaks loose from the constellation to which it belongs it must get lost, unless it can attach itself to some new constellation, and