Ralcy Husted Bell

“ We may excuse faulty attire, forgive the social slips of those who have forgotten from their little book on etiquette—in a word, we can overlook almost all shortcomings and errors of conduct save those only of speech. There is something in a man’s words that marks him with the mark of Cain or puts the halo around his brow. Yet, what a curious thing is language? Words are the least part of it. Their aptness, inflections, tones, pronunciations, stresses, and combinations—their parallelisms and contrasts—all these are immeasurably greater than the mere words themselves. ”

“ Nothing else in language is more strange, more strong, uglier, or more beautiful. It is the element in language that lives most, lasts longest, and decays quickest. It is vital. It belches words which become miasma. It spews words that fall into the gutter and disappear—cruel, warty, misshapen, monstrous! words that are ashamed in the light—words that are the seed of hideous fungi growing in darkness from decay. Slang also drops words that quiver, palpitate in the light—words that strike hard, that smell of sulphur and trail smoke. ”

“ There is refuge in cunning, as the diplomatic element of language so well exemplifies. Slang is so diplomatic that usually as soon as it is understood it changes. The greater part of it is nascent and ever-changing. Words and phrases disappear for a century and suddenly reappear. To study slang is to uncover the heart of man from the débris of the past. The convict speech of the last century becomes the standard of excellence in this. Felony becomes respectable and boasts of heraldry. The great soul of mankind is a tumbling sea of light and darkness. ”

“ Some words come to us only in dreams; some steal upon us unaware to shame us by their presence; others blossom from the lips to bless all in their company; some are lecherous beasts that prowl, as wolves, about our nobler moods to devour the best children of our thought. Some words are the voice of frenzy, the cry of pain, the moans of the dying; some are the challenge of the strong who dare, others the plea of the weak who fear; some are the clarion of victory, and others are the echo of defeat; some are liars and some are the soul of truth ”

“ Yet language never was adequate to thought, or its matrix—perhaps never will be, surely not as long as language is vivified by the spirit of progress; but words came to be the indispensable tools with which the soul must work out its destiny. What the hand was to the brain, the tongue is to the mind. Thus humanity found one of its authentic gods in itself. In that discovery lies the chief hope of the race. ”

“ Yet strangely enough, the faculty of speech is not congenital. Man is born as dumb as any other animal; but unlike other animals, he is born with the will-power of bringing forth in his brain a faculty that sets him apart from all the beasts of the earth. Still, no language ever came to him spontaneously. Every word was born of a need. His mind kissed his brain and words blossomed from his lips. Nor did the words issue merely as sounds, but they came full-fledged as verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech which make up a language in its infancy. ”

“ The shudder is slang.
Slang is endowed with perpetual and disreputable youth. The paradox of it is: if it survive youth it becomes admirable idiom. Slang is emotive, symbolic, intellectual. It is the most entrancing element of language, because it displays so many unsuspected and diverse forms of thought. It is the mirror of human character: traits of the populace are set forth as by reflection from fragments. Slang retains fugitive moans and furtive smiles. If we were wise enough, we should be able to read in it an explanation of human misery, and perhaps the source of happiness. ”

“ Signs only can be effective and constant through the law of standards. An idea is represented by a sound: the sound must have a distinct value in order to condense the image from the shapeless cloud of thought or feeling of which the idea is a part. When the sign-standards are relaxed, the word-values diminish and ideas of a similar order are confused—the bête noir of careless speech. ”

“ The humanity within us appears to be a synthesis of nature and art. Therefore, in a sense and to a degree, the nobler nature of man is self-created. Through this synthesis we catch the few glimpses of ourselves, just as we see something of our own earth in a ray of light from the sun. Art, of course, is natural but it is not nature. A poem is more than words, however skilfully combined: soil, air, moisture, and light are the least of a garden rose. Nature gives capability; art implies skill; science supplies knowledge; and the synthesis of nature and art implies a mysterious x. ”

“ As Hearn says, words have personalities; they combine as if by magic, and lo! a poem is born. Some lend themselves to the honeyed seductions of rhythm and metre; others are as stubborn as the highland glebe beneath the breath of frost. Some words have auras, and some stink—many suggest colors and fine odors; and every one carries a meaning, almost known to babes, that has escaped the dictionary-maker. Words indeed are mysterious beings. Whatever they may have been originally, they have evolved into something higher, something very unlike their earliest ancestors, as we are unlike ours. ”

“ Kindness enables us to cultivate the wholesome, the generous; and wisdom helps us to kill all cruel forms. Art says, make friends with the beautiful—make war on the ugly. Utility demands the use of clear, persuasive, unequivocal terms. Only falsehood and diplomacy need the uncertain, the two-faced words. Thus it is a form of immorality to be slovenly in speech, or to revert to cruder forms of expression, even in addressing the culturally deficient and the spiritually bankrupt, for to them we owe our best, since they of all others need it most. ”

“ Language is full of pitfalls, contradictions, and traps. Serious speech not always is the sign of serious character. Stinging devils use honeyed words, good men speak plainly, and wise men not always well. Only poets are the magicians, for they have mastered the mysteries of words. Only the poet understands the different characteristics of words: their tones, shades, colors, tears, and smiles. He sees that some words are as clear as dew, and that many are as smeared glass. He finds that some are harder than flint, colder than ice, hotter than fire. ”

“ They have robbed the soul of courage, and they have thronged it with the phantoms of fear. They have driven light and love from the brain, and they have put the serpents of hatred and the beasts of prey within the dark cavern of the skull. They have wrapped the earth in a mantle of misery. ”

“ In the light of modern science it does not seem reasonable to suppose that speech was given to primitive mankind as we give prepared food to children. It is not likely that words came into existence spontaneously, since no child ever was born with one upon its lips. Indeed nothing is more evident than that words were invented; that they are, as we understand them, an artificial product of human personality; that they respond to needs as surely as tools supply wants: in brief, whatever else they may be, they certainly are tools.
Nothing is truer than that necessity is the mother of invention. ”

“ Some words pass trippingly down the ages, suffering little change; others are stillborn; some lead heavy, unhappy lives; while others are gay as butterflies beneath cloudless summer skies; some are balmy with the breath of humor; and others are like sparks struck from flint and steel: some are puny, and others have constitutions of iron; many are ugly monsters born to crime; some are like songs—the soul of music dwells in them; some are like stinging bees, come to torment; others are like winged arrows shot at shining marks ”

“ No two persons ever speak alike. No man ever hides himself under his words, though he pile them mountain-high. We all are bound by the fatalism of our words.
Language, as we are accustomed to regard it, was put forth by the will; but when it reaches a certain stage, the will becomes powerless to alter its course, or at least to shape its destiny. In everything but pure science, language runs away with us, and there it balks. No one ever mastered his mother-tongue—but his mother-tongue always masters him. The mystery of words is inextricably associated with the mystery of higher consciousness ”

“ Anyone can understand this, because all have been at times both angry and vain, and occasionally too blind to see that the wit that wounds is not wit; and that the humor which humiliates another is not extraordinarily humorous. These things are clear enough; but that which is not clear is the state of heart capable of uttering deliberately a cruel word, or that condition of mind morbid enough to withhold a kind word. Nothing could be meaner except the adding of lies to the cruelty. ”

“ Psychic phenomena transform and otherwise modify speech; and these phenomena are as active to-day as ever. Ceaselessly, intelligence and ignorance work side by side as a team in the modifying of our tongue. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, and quite paradoxically, they shape it into an engine more and more capable for its purposes. Ignorance and Wisdom are the two gods of destiny. The collective human will, a vast underlying, impersonal power, is a potent factor in this process: a factor that has been ignored and even denied by students of speech. ”

“ If the mind were only a function of the brain—or at least, if words were a function of the speech-center, merely—naturally there would be no consciousness of impairment. This phase of consciousness, therefore, must occupy some complex in time or space or relationship outside, if not separate from, that occupied by the functions of the brain. All this deepens the mysteries surrounding our words; or, rather, as we think on the subject, we become more keenly aware of our lack of exact knowledge—certainly, in the relationship of brain to mind.
For the most part, the brain is a barren waste. ”

“ While the mysterious energies of language forever at play are many and diverse, the basic problem of linguistics is that of signs. It is from the study of signs that we borrow our most telling significations of a language. The sounds of words in themselves are of secondary moment since they serve mainly to distinguish one system from another of the same order. One only has to listen to a strange tongue to realize what a small part of a word is its sound; and at the same time, one is compelled to feel that language is a very large social phenomenon. ”

“ Orderly Relationships
It is difficult to realize what a network of laws enmesh our poor little vocabularies; nor can we easier perceive from what mysterious source these laws have come. Have they no intelligent purpose? Are all these series of flexible yet constant relations the result of “blind forces” working to some purpose by fate or to no purpose by chance; and have they no destiny which, seeing the way, guides them through more than multitudinous wildernesses? Is intelligence the offspring of order, or is order the symbol of intelligence? ”

“ Too often the idea of the purity of a tongue is purely a matter of prejudice. A foreign word that is needed—one that is fit—one that adds to the powers, the subtleties of expression, to the readiness of understanding, to the utility, or to the beauty of a language, should be introduced into that language without affectation or reserve.
One disadvantage of adopting foreign words is owing to the absence of the time-factor. Words of the best kind are old enough to have acquired associations in the thought of the folk using them. ”

“ A few creature-comforts obtained through crudely constructed phrases of ugly words are more to be desired than is beauty of language if it must be coupled with privation. This is the rule primitive and primordial. But there comes a time in the progress of a people when the laws of beauty are operative because the demands of a higher and nobler nature have become imperative. This condition manifests itself both by a quickening of the masses—a dim longing in the heart of humanity—and a peculiar activity of those whom we call artists, for short. ”