Hawke's Bay Herald. MONDAY, JUNE 7, 1897. THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 10629, 7 June 1897, Page 2

Hawke's Bay Herald. MONDAY, JUNE 7, 1897. THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE.

There Is; an old Joe Mlllerlim akoat a oanny Sooil, a joke-loving Irishman, and a big dictionary. The ton of Scotia wanted somettiag to read. Tha Hibernian gave him tha dictionary. He continued to lead It for some time with apparent interest, when the Irishman asked him what he thought of the book, " It's lnoerfiatln 1 and verra Instrootlve," was the repjy, " bnt the author ohangea frae bbb soobjeot tae anither wl' nnco 1 rapeedlby," I And In truth a dictionary 1b not generally regarded as light literatnre. Bat as now ajnd again a genius like Mr Gladstone o^n oonstrucb an interesting superstructure on a foundation of dry-as-dust figures, {so oan the man of discernment find amusement aa well as Inatruo* tion in a good! dictionary. This 1b brought home to ua py a writer in the hpeaher, who reviews ; vola. 111. and lv. of the Oxford English Dlotlonary. Theseponder. out tomes dean only with part of the letters D. and part jof F. In aooordanoe with the praotlee of the editors these volumes QBk in advance for some information aa to words beginnlng / with H. Hitherto, we are told, for instance, no earlier aim of "hackney ooaoh" has been discovered than one in 1635. It wa3 in that year that a proclamation was issued prohibiting them from standing la the soveete, There were twenty oooohes in all; to supply the wanto of London in the <;lays of Charles f. In 1761 the number wan limited to eight hundred, Why a limit is fixed Is known only to the wisdom of onr anoeotora, Twenty-throe years later the limit had been rained to one tbonaand. One day in Jane, 1781, "Dr. Beattle observed, as something extraordinary which had happened to him, that he had chanced to bob No, 1 and No, 1000 of the imokney ooaohes the first and t>he last." According to Whitaker there ore at present more than seven thousand hansomn. Of hansom, by they way, the first quotation dates only from 1869 ; a muoh earlier one can surely be speedily found, Half- holiday, so far as is at present asioertslued, Is foar years older than hackney coach. Did ShakeBpeare'a "whining school- boy" get none, or, happy lad, wete his holidays all whole holiday a? Hairdresser would seem to be a much more modern word than we bad Imagined ; at all events, it is not known to have been in use earlier than in 1761. Barter had a more extended meaning in those days, including, on the one hand, surgeon, and on the other hand, hairdresier. Some of the barbers also practised dentistry ; but in that art they had formidable rivals in the village blacksmiths-. Earn (onred) only datea back, at present, to 1742, and hand (at oarda) to 1800. At what date was it that Charles Lamb said to hla partner at whl«t : "If dirt were trumps, what hands you would hold ? " We are surprised to learn that the antiquity of hailstorm haa uot as yet been carried boyond 1818, and that of halfpait . . o'clock beyond 1817. la the volnmea themselves some curious origins of words are given. The derivation of diimal, for imtanee, la onrtous. ; It first appeared as "dies malt, • evil days,' • unlucky dayß. 1 ' It was thus originally a substantive of collective meaning;' when 'day' waa I added, making < dismal days,' " on the analogy of "summer days, winter days." The dismal daya of the medlasra! calendar were January 1, 25 j; February 4, 26; Maroh 1, 28 ; AprlJ 10, 20 ; May 3, 25 ; June 10, 16 ; July 13, 22 } August 1, 30 ; September 3, &1 ; Ostober 3, 22 ; November 5, 28 ; December 7, 22. This derivation of dismal, fahloh was given so long ago as 1617, " wain discarded by Dr, Trenoh as 'one of thoae plausible ety. mologlea whloh one lesrns after a while to reject with contempt.' j" Thus do doctors dlffar ! It 1) interesting to trace the forms taken by duhabille, foi so it is that Dr. Murray, the editor jof this volume, spells it. It first appeared more than two centuries ago as dis> habille; einoe then it I has been written dishabillee, dishabilU, deshabille, disability, deshabiU, deshabille, and ditabil. Let no examiner heno'jforth presume to give an unfortunate candidate a bad mark for mispelling this word'; however it may have been spelt, a jutiblfioation oan be found. One of the eJ«-|WOrds, dispropor* Uonablcnesa, we aro told. "ia reputed to be the longest in the English language.'' It ii. however, shorter by one letter than unthoroughfaretomene»B,\ that Ingenious synonym of impenetrability invented by some sturdy champion off Teutonlo Eng» llih. " The impenetrab llty of matter " he expressed as "the anthoroughfareaomenesß of staff." Ths Germans will triumph over ua when the y learn that oar longest word contains only two-and-twenty letters, Their Emperor, fired with love of the Fathet land, would on the shorteot notioe prodnc c half a dozan far longer in either a spoeiih or a prayer, In "Whltaker'a Almanack " for this year we find January 7th Aeaorlbed aa St. Distaffs Day, The elxplanatton q{ i

the term Is thus given by Dr. Murray, "it waß the day after Twelfth Day ou wbioh women resumed their spinning and other employments after the holidays," How a distaff got turned into a saint we are not told. In the Rood old days, ages befoie " reiearoh " was ever dreamt of, Donteronomy was supposed to be a man, and, nnleia the reviewer's memory deoslvea him, was canonised. The wonder is that that blessed word Mesopotamia was not turned Into a Virgin and Martyr. In disposition, as used of the mind, we may probably traoe an astrologioal origin. In astrology the word signifies " the situation of a planet in a horoeoope, as supposed to de« toimlno the nature or fortune of a perI eon.' 1 When we say that a ohlld's dUposition is good, how little do we think of the position of the planets at the time of bis birth ! Neither when we talk of a dlßtemper do we any more trouble onr heads abont that disproportionate mixture of the bodily humors, that derangement o! the "temper, I ' that want of dne balance between Contraries, against whloh the physicians of old were always striving, to the rnln of the health of their unfortunate patients. In a traot of the Restoration It was maintained that coffee by its dessloattng quality, so dried np the radical molstnre that the radical heat ob« t&lned a tnoßt dangerous supremacy^ It was all in vain that an advocate for the Inew beverage asserted . that snoh was Its effioaoy in giving health and strength that it could soaroely be donbted that the black broth of the Spartans, to whloh their victories were mainly due, wai nothing else than blaok coffee, The derivation of dirge is oarioni. Originally It was " dlrtge, the first word of the Latin antiphon, Dirige, Domini* Detumem,ineon*peclu tuo viam mtam (' Direct, 0 Lord my God, my way in Thy at«ht ')." This antiphon was used at Matins in the office of the dead. What a lone; stride Is taken from the first word of a psalm to dirge-ale, an ale-drinking at a funeral I To inoh baso uses may words return as well as men. It is strange how some words hold their own 1 while others drop ont of me. "Your Graoe," we still apply to an archbishop or a duke, but •' Your Discretion " is no longer need of a bishop, admirably as It la, for the most part, suited to the episcopal character, Perhaps in the days when it fell Into disnse there was a whole I benoh of bishops of the oharaoter of the two men who at present hold the Bees of Chester and St. Asaph. " four Indiscretion" wonld be the title that wonld best suit them. Why has not diligence held Its own, as applied to a stage ooaoh in England 1 It was so used by Smollett, Wesley, Sheridan, and Finny Barney. Diligences need to run to Brighton, Bedford, and York, among other places ; but they do not seem to have survived to the beginning of the nineteenth oentury. Comment is sometimes made on the com" monußss of the use of tho titlo of "Esquire" in New Zealand, and It it generally assumed to be a bit of modern snobbishness. Bat from thia volume we learn that not far short of two centuries ago Steele, speaking of the letters posted any day in London, said :— 11 I'll undertake that yon will not find three dlreoted to any bnt esquires. And I don't know (he continued) bat by the late Aot of Naturalisation foreigners will assume that title an part of the immunity of Englishmen," Turning 'to the letter F,, it is rather surprising to learn that flabbergatt Is a century and a qnarter old, and that It oaine into use abont the same time as bore, as Is shown by the following quotation from an article " On New Words" In the Annual Eegister for 1772 : " Now we are flabbergasted and bored from morning to night." Punch forty years ago went a stop further and oolned flabbergaitct' tion ; but that does not soerc to have got Into popnlar use. We are Bomewbat shocked to find in a learned work published nnder the ansploes of the University of Oxford an extract wbioh certainly is wanting in respeot to the benoh of bishops, "He "—happily we are not told who— "flapdoodled ronnd the subject In the usual arobieplsoopal way." Flapdoodling and an archbishop ! Flapdoodling and gaiters and apron ] The very notions are wide as the poles asunder, Fizzle in the slang of the American undergraduates means either "to fall in an examination" or else "to cause a person to fail." la this latter sense It answers to onr pluck and plough. " Fizzle him tenderly," wrote a poet In the Yale Literary Magazine so long ago as 1850, What a mass of learning has been bronght to bear on the domestlo ftea ! Small as Is the animal, and short as 1b its name, nevertheless in onr language it has existed in eleven different forms In the singular and fonr in the plural. We ore, moreover, told Its name In Middle Dutoh, Middle Low German, Old High German, and Old Norse. The quotations devoted to it spread over nearly twelve centuries, from a glossary of the year 700 to the travels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote ; " Fleas In Borne come to everybody's business and bosom." If so much entertainment can be unearthed in two volumes dealing with "Diffluent" to " Distrußtfnl," and "Fish" to "Fiexnoso," what a mine of lore tbe patient investigator will find In the whole dictionary, when completed I