Diaphoretic

“ Unfortunately these analyses have discovered far too few of the principles entering the syntheses which we call words. For after all, it is the synthesis that clears the understanding; and it is the analysis, too often, that clouds it. Thus far, no study of isolated sounds seems to promise an explanation of the sound-flux which, in passing through cerebral processes, enters the mind as a word. The important elements of a word are not more marked in its sound than in its quality of registration through the organs of hearing. ”

“ Metaphor—the transference of a word from its usual meaning to an analogous one—is the intellectual agent of language, just as onomatopœia is the mechanical agent. Metaphor and catachresis (i.e., the use of the same word to express two different things which are supposed to present some analogy to each other, as when “sweet” is applied to sounds) have been called the two channels of expression [118] which irrigate the wide field of human intelligence. ”

“ Our practical distinction will therefore be between conscious or 'living' and unconscious or 'dead' metaphor, whether natural or artificial in origin: and again, among living metaphors, we shall distinguish between the intentional, which are designed for effect, and the unintentional, which, though still felt to be metaphors, are used merely as a part of the ordinary vocabulary. It may seem at first sight that this classification leaves us where we were: how can we know whether a writer uses a particular metaphor consciously or unconsciously? ”

“ As soon as phonetic corruption shows itself in a language, that language has lost what we considered to be the most essential character of all human speech, namely, that every part of it should have a meaning. ”

“ We must not complain of the lunar beam of genius, because it has not the brightness of the sun. Our choice lies between an enchanting and beautiful twilight, or a darkness which may be felt.
If any one wishes to compare the difference between metaphorical language and the phraseology which studiously avoids the use of metaphor, and clings as far as possible to bare fact, let him contrast the nomenclature of science with the parallel nomenclature of the people. ”

“ A word, a sentence, a grammatical form, consists of two elements, one, the articulate utterance, the other, the signification or thought which the utterance symbolizes. Sound and sense are the two factors which make up speech, and it is, therefore, in respect of both sound and sense that our comparisons have to be made. Comparative philology divides itself into phonology and sematology, to which, perhaps, we may also add morphology. Phonology is the science of sounds, sematology the science of meanings, and morphology the science of grammatical forms. ”

“ But the opposing orders of phenomena are less contradictory than they seem at first glance. The logic of change is unbroken when language is regarded in the light of its double aspect. Note must be taken of shifting phonetics, of mutations between image and concept, and of the impossibility of treating separately the different factors of a phenomenon without regard to its unity,—all which add to the difficulties in trying to solve the mysteries of words. ”

“ There is another aspect of this matter that is too common to be overlooked: the sign of the concept, image, or feeling, takes the place of the concept, etc., by a kind of reflex action. This phenomenon accounts for the desert wastes in language, for the infinite mediocrity of literature, for the inanities of current speech. The relations between word and concept are displaced by relations merely between words. The longer process is sacrificed to the shorter. Words become empty of meaning; they multiply hollow sounds ”

“ These areas of the brain which harbor the faculty of speech do not originate our words any more than paper and type originate them; but like paper and type the sensory areas register the incoming words, and like a phonograph the motor-areas discharge the outgoing words. Therefore, of the mind all words are born; in the mind they dwell and have their being; but in the brain a mysterious mechanism gives them currency. ”

“ As in phonology we have the growth or decay of sounds, so in sematology we have the growth or decay of ideas. The three principles of linguistic change, imitation, emphasis and laziness, are incessantly at work on the meanings as well as upon the sounds of words. Analogy is ever lending them new senses, and the metaphorical senses may come to be used to the utter forgetfulness of the original one. ”

“ A lover of words for their own sake, to whom nothing about them is unimportant, a minute and constant observer of their physiognomy, he will be on the alert not only for obviously mixed metaphors of course, but for the metaphor that is mixed in all our speech, though a rapid use may involve no cognition of it. Currently recognising the incident, the colour, the physical elements or particles in words like absorb, consider, extract, to take the first that occur, he will avail himself of them, as further adding to the resources of expression. ”

“ But everything we say is metaphorical if we choose to be captious. Scratch the simplest expressions, and you will find the metaphor. Written words are handage, inkage and paperage; it is only by metaphor, or substitution and transposition of ideas, that we can call them language. They are indeed potential language, and the symbols employed presuppose nouns, verbs, and the other parts of speech; but for the most part it is in what we read between the lines that the profounder meaning of any letter is conveyed. ”

“ Verbal ideas were by far the most numerous, ranging in degree from actual speech-movements to what G calls his "verbalizing tendency," in which sometimes a mere upward pressure of the tongue against the roof of the mouth indicates the beginning of a word or letter. In many cases the stimulus-word is simply supplemented to form a new (reaction-) word; e. g., "beauty" is completed by "ful" to stand for "beautiful." No less frequent are alliterations and synonyms, while rhymes and even nonsense-rhymes occur at times. ”

“ In estimating this we are all subject to delusion, not improbably I am so, when it appears to me that the metaphor in the first speech of his dramatic scene is too much drawn out. It does not pass off as rapidly as metaphors ought to do, I think, in dramatic writing. I am well aware that our early dramatists abound with these continuities of imagery, but to me they appear laboured and unnatural, at least unsuited to that species of composition, of which action and motion are the essentials. ”

“ Thus words do not exist in sound only, since the sound merely is an instrument of the idea; neither can a word exist fully in its written or printed form, for the form is a symbol. It can not exist as a word merely in physiologic function, because the physiologic function must pass into a psychologic process before the mind can interpret the final phenomenon as a word. ”

“ We express in language, by means of verbs, adjectives, and equivalent expressions, what, as to their qualities, things are, what they do, and in what relation they stand. But in addition to such expressions, by which we qualify, describe, compare, and distinguish the various objects that we observe and think about, we have certain other expressions by means of which we assert that given objects are, or are real, rather than are not, or are unreal. Now, in technical phrase, we shall hereafter call the expressions of the latter type the ontological vocabulary of our language. ”

“ The morphology of speech is the reverse side of its physiology, dealing with the spirit and inner life of the sentence just as the physiology of speech deals with the outward frame. If words are posterior to the sentence, if they are in fact [440] but so many crystallized and abbreviated sentences, that part of the science of language which treats of their meanings ought strictly to follow a chapter on morphology. That which is most scientific, however, is not always the most practically convenient, and such is the case with our present subject. ”

“ The nouns which we learn after all others, and therefore forget soonest, are the names of persons, so that elderly people very commonly complain how (?) they can not recall persons’ names.”
Founded on some of the theories of memory, this is good reasoning; but it pushes back the mystery only a step. Why should this mechanism manifest a peculiar selective power over the different parts of speech? Why should the verb-cells be stronger than the noun-cells? Or if there be no actual verb-cells and noun-cells, why should the verb-impressions be deeper than the noun-impressions? ”

“ Thus, in The men were sifting meal we have a literal use of sift; in Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat, 'sift' is a live metaphor; in the sifting of evidence, the metaphor is so familiar that it is about equal chances whether sifting or examination will be used, and a sieve is not present to the thought—unless, indeed, some one conjures it up by saying All the evidence must first be sifted with acid tests, or with the microscope; under such a stimulus our metaphor turns out to have been not dead, but dormant. ”

“ Our language is full of this kind of speaking and writing, which is called "metaphorical." The word metaphor comes from two Greek words meaning "to carry over." In "metaphorical" speech a name or description of one thing is transferred to another [139] thing to which it could not apply in ordinary commonplace language.
By means of metaphors we express more vividly and strikingly our feelings on any subject. We draw our metaphors from many different sources. Many of them naturally come from Nature, for the facts of Nature are all around us. ”

“ And the case of linguistic research has been specially hard. This study has, if the metaphor may be allowed, a very extended frontier. On one side it touches the domain of literature, on other sides it is conterminous with history, with ethnology and anthropology, with physiology in so far as language is the production of the brain and tissues of a living being, with physics in questions of pitch and stress accent, with mental science in so far as the principles of similarity, contrast, and contiguity affect the forms and the meanings of words through association of ideas. ”

“ From this state of grammatical numbness, languages recover by a secondary formation, which grows up slowly and imperceptibly at first in the speech of the people; till at last the reviving spirit rises upwards, and sweeps away, like the waters in spring, the frozen surface of an effete government, priesthood, literature, and grammar. ”

“ Thus, it will be observed, a number of parts of words are taken and thrown together, by a process which has been happily termed agglutination, so as to form one word, conveying a complicated idea. There is also an elaborate system of inflection; in nouns, for instance, there is one kind of inflection to express the presence or absence of vitality, and another to express number. The genius of the language has been described as accumulative: it “tends rather to add syllables or letters, making farther distinctions in objects already before the mind, than to introduce new words.” ”

“ The foot of a mountain is as much a metaphorical expression as the arm of the sea or the arm of law, and every metaphorical expression is an example of analogy. Three-fourths of our language, indeed, may be said to consist of worn-out metaphors. In no other way can terms be found for the spiritual and the abstract. Spirit is itself “the breath,” the abstract that which is “drawn apart.” Our knowledge grows by comparing the unknown with the [182] known, and the record of that increase of knowledge grows in the same way. ”

“ Perhaps a word has no reality in the sense of a dominating essential character, unless the acoustic image be so designated.
We have seen that a word is not merely a sign expressed gesturally, phonetically, or graphically, etc.; for it also is a physiological function, a physical process, an acoustic impulse bearing an image, or capable of arousing an image, which amounts to the same thing: a psychic phenomenon revolving around a central concept, or a sensorial phenomenon with a peripheral sway over certain emotions, etc. ”

“ Of course, it is not necessary that the signification of the words we compare should be exactly the same; the signification of words changes as much as their outward phonetic form; but we must be able to show that one meaning is derived from the other, or from a common parentage, just as we show that one sound is derived from another or from a common source. ”

“ The metaphysics of speech, therefore, is but the second branch and division of its morphology, bearing the same relation to the inquiry into the growth and origin of stems and suffixes and suchlike phonetic forms of grammar that sematology does to phonology. The morphology of language is as much concerned with grammatical ideas as with the external form in which they are embodied. ”

“ We become more familiar every day with the secret ways of language, and there is no reason to doubt that in the end grammatical analysis will be as successful as chemical analysis. Grammar, though sometimes very bewildering to us in its later stages, is originally a much less formidable undertaking than is commonly supposed. What is grammar after all but declension and conjugation? Originally declension could not have been anything but the composition of a noun with some other word expressive of number and case. ”