Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/93

III.] nor its definition; it is only its designation, an arbitrary and conventional sign with which we learn to associate it. Hence it has no internal force conservative of its identity, but is exposed to all the changes which external circumstances, the needs of practical use, the convenience and caprice of those who employ it, may suggest. When we have once formed a compound, and applied it to a given purpose, we are not at all solicitous to keep up the memory of its origin; we are, rather, ready to forget it. The word once coined, we accept it as an integral representative of the conception to which we attach it, and give our whole attention to that, not concerning ourselves about its derivation, or its etymological aptness. Practical convenience becomes the paramount consideration, to which every other is made to give way. Let us look at an example or two. There is a certain class of insects, the most brilliant and beautiful which the entomologist knows. Its most common species, both in the Old world and the New, are of a yellow colour; clouds of these yellow flutterers, at certain seasons, swarm upon the roads and fill the air. Because, now, butter is or ought to be yellow, our simple and unromantic ancestors called the insect in question the butterfly, as they called a certain familiar yellow flower the buttercup. In our usage, this word has become the name, not of the yellow species only, but of the whole class. And, though its form is unmutilated, and its composition as clear as on the day when the words were first put together to make it, probably not one person in a hundred of those who employ it has ever thought of its origin, or considered why it was applied to the use in which it serves him. We no longer invest it with the paltry and prosaic associations which, from its derivation, would naturally cluster about it; it has become, from long alliance in our thoughts with the elegant creatures which it designates, instinct with poetic beauty and grace.

Again, some ancient navigator, who discovered a certain huge island on the north-eastern coast of America, had not ingenuity enough to devise a better appellation for it than the new-found land. Such a name was evidently no more applicable to this than to any other of the newly-discovered