Old Meanings of Words.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 838, 23 March 1888, Page 10

Old Meanings of Words.

There is quite a study of old manners in the present meaning of such words as base, villain, catiff, and the like. Base formerly signified only low in birth, and Our Lord was said to be ‘ equal to them of greatest baseness but the pride of the aristocracy (who by that very word declare themselves to be morally the best) assumed that lowest birth meant lowest worth. A knave once meant only a boy. The patient Grisel bore * a knave child ’ to the cruel Marquis who had robbed her of her daughter. In German, the old word (with only a ‘ b’for a ‘ v’) * knabe’ or ‘ knave ’ still means ‘ boy ’ simply, and is no term of reproach. Amongst us it was formerly born by the boys in great Lords’ kitchens. These were reviled and beaten by the great Lords, who, when they called ‘ Knave !’ turned up their high and mighty noses. Catiff, again, is only the NormanFrench form of the word captive. Dr Trench, in his scholarly and interesting treatise on English words, * used formerly in senses different from their present,’ observes that captivity tends to degrade ; but the later sense of the word catiff must have arisen in no small degree from the bluster of, the conqueror. The black guards were the scullions and kitchen people who, in old English days, when great families migrated from one residence to another, had charge of the sooty pots and pans and other kitchen utensils. We read in Webster of a fellow * that within this twenty years rode with the black guard in the Duke’s carriage, amongst spits and dripping-pans;’ while anoldtreatise on Divinity Bpeaks of ‘ Dukes, Earls, and Lords, great commanders In war, common soldiers, and kitchen-boys, glad to trudge it on foot in the mire, hand-in-hand—a Duke or Earl not disdaining to support or help up one of the blaok guards ready to fall, lest he himself might fall into the mire and have none to help him.’ Bombast was the Elizabethan orinoline, being the old name for the cotton which supplied a vast amount of wadding in the clothes of polite people. ‘Certain lam.’ says Stubbs,’ there was never any kind of apparel ever iu vented that could more disproportion the body of man than these doublets, stuffed with four, five, or six pounds of bombast at the least.’ The globular buttons, now worn only by pages, were worn at one time by the exquisite ‘ in his French doublet with his blistered bullions.’ Bullion, of course, properly means any gold metal lower than the standard of the Mint. In the word buxom we can trace the whole coarse of the change of meaning from the original sense of bendable, which implied obsdient or pliable. Being pliable was being ready to accommodate one’s self to others, and to be obliging. But that is a feminine virtue more especially ; it makes a woman cheerful company ; and ten to one this cheerful, companionable woman, who hns taken the world easily, is not of the lean sort. Yet in the old days, with the cares of a martyr on him, the lean man could say : —- ‘ I submit myself to this holy Church of Christ, to be ever buxom and obedient to the ordinance of it.’ The word carriage means no longer what we ourselves bear, but that which bears us. We have quite lost the original sense of the text, * And David left his carriage in the hand of the keeper of the carriage.’ It must be because we are all so much more roady te condemn than to applaud, that the word censure, which means only an expression of opinion, now only signifies blame. Cunning ÜBed to mean simply knowing, having knowledge, but the perverse and selfish use commonly made of superior knowledge—early or exclusive intelligence—has at last led to an habitual employment of this word in a bad sense. Again, the word demure once honestly meant what it now only expresses with a latent sneer. FaoetiousneßS was once the mirth of the refined, now the name is applied mostly to the ruder sort of jesting. A man’s garb used to be his whole ontside demeanour. First for your garb ; it mustjbe grave and serious. »

Very reserved and locked. Now it means only so much of him as he may find, catalogued and priced at stated seasons by his tailor. Garble used to mean any picking or sorting ; garbled spices were picked spices. We apply the word now only to a picking and choosing of bits of books, and always assume that this picking is done unfairly, and with an unfriendly purpose. Copy is, almost unchanged, the Latin word for plenty. To make a book or writing plentiful by transcribing it again and again, was to copy. To. transcribe was to copy. Afterwards to copy meant but little more than to transcribe.

Desire is now a forward longing ; once it was a backward longing —a wish, for in stanoe, to recover the beloved d*ad. That is the sense of the word where in the Book of Chronicles it is said of Jehoram that‘he reigned in Jerusalem eignt years, and departed without beihg desired.! Disease,

meaning, in fact, only a want of ease, is now J a word only applied to serious illness. It used to mean any discomfort or distress. Another word of which the sense has been intensified, and even altered, is explode. It is explaud, fthe opposite to applaud, and meant atfirstthe driving of an actor from the stage by a loud clapping of the hands. From the loudness we get the present idea of an exploded thing, as something that has been burst with noise, and suppose that an ‘ exploded opinion ’ is our figurative phrases for an opinion that it is burst and gone to pieces. Nevertheless, the phrase did really mean, when it was first used, an opinion that has been, as we should now say, hissed off by the public. ‘ Shall there,’ South asks in one of his sermons, * that man pass for a proficient in Christ’s school, who would have been exploded in the school of Zeno or Epictetus ?’