Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 099.djvu/168

154 To be indifferent to the Study of Words is like "incurious dulness" to the image and superscription of ancient coins; current words being like current coinage, with this addition in the latter case, that each piece of money passing through our hands has something of its own characteristic and note- worthy—one, stamped with some striking maxim, another with some important fact, another with some memorable date—some pieces being works of finest art, graven with rare and beautiful devices, or bearing the head of immortal sage or heroic king—others again being the sole surviving monuments of mighty nations that once filled the world with their fame.

Great are the curiosities of etymology. We remember to have seen an incredulous smile excited by Professor Maurice on the faces of a group of listeners, when he mentioned, as an instance of this curiosity, the radical identity of the Greek hylè and the English savage; although he had but to supply the few and satisfactory links of relationship to convince the most sceptical. Even within the compass of our mother-tongue, the relationships of words are often unsuspected. Thus Mr. Treneh shows how from the one Anglo-Saxon word to sheer, comes a family so seemingly unrelated as shire, shore, share, sheers, shred, sherd. The multiform usages of the word post may be brought to a common centre—post being the Latin positus, "that which is placed"—and thus a piece of timber is "placed" in the ground, and so a post—a military station is a "post," for a man is "placed" in it, and must not quit it without orders—to travel "post," is to have certain relays of horses "placed" at intervals, so that no delay on the road may occur—the "post"-office is that which avails itself of this mode of communication—to "post" a ledger is to "place" or register its several items. We are reminded that "heaven" is only the perfect of to heave, being properly the sky as it is raised aloft; the "smith" has his name from the blows he smites on the anvil; "wrong" is the perfect participle of to wring,—that which is wrung or wrested from the right; the "brunt" of a battle is its heat, where it burns the most fiercely; the "haft" of a knife is that whereby you have or hold it; the "left" hand is the hand we leave, inasmuch as for twenty times we use the right hand, we do not once employ it. In the section entitled "On the History in Words," we find numerous interesting results of philological study, tending to show how far such a study may go in helping to reproduce the past history of England—for instance, while the statelier superstructure of the language (almost all articles of luxury, all that has to do with the chase, with chivalry, with personal adornment) id Norman throughout, the broad basis of the language, and therefore of the life (the great features of nature, all the prime social relations), is Saxon—the stable elements of Anglo-Saxon life, however overlaid for a while, still making good their claim to be the solid groundwork of the after nation as of the after language. A suggestive history in words is pointed out in miscreant, a term applied by the Crusaders to the Mahometans, and meaning at first simply a misbeliever, and then as applicable to the royal-hearted Saladin as to the most infamous wretch that fought in his armies;—in saunter, and saunterer, derived from "la Sainte Terre," whither wended at last every idler that liked strolling about better than performing the duties of his calling;—in poltroon, the supposed derivative from pollice truncus, one who has deprived himself of his thumb, to