Idiosyncrasy

“ This will everywhere is present, and ever busy changing, mutilating, repairing, and transforming language. Countless millions of efforts are made every day to express a little more clearly than language permits, those ideas which the mind seeks to utter. Millions of these efforts mutilate whilst trying to simplify grammar; millions combine to form the crude and simpler phrases of slang; millions of efforts hack away at an adverb until it is trimmed down to a preposition. In this continual process countless individuals combine all unwittingly against existing forms of speech. ”

“ For my own part, I prefer a noble Sentiment that is depressed with homely Language, infinitely before a vulgar one that is blown up with all the Sound and Energy of Expression. Whether this Defect in our Tragedies may arise from Want of Genius, Knowledge, or Experience in the Writers, or from their Compliance with the vicious Taste of their Readers, who are better Judges of the Language than of the Sentiments, and consequently relish the one more than the other, I cannot determine. ”

“ In comparison with idiomatic expression, the study of the roots of words and their derivation, it appears to me, is of but secondary importance; idiomatic expression being the kernel in which the tree of national expression had its incipiency, its origin. It is the life which pulsates through its veins, in which it has its stay and maintenance; the nerves which tingle with its intelligence, its genius, its soul. Take away this soul, and it ceases to exist. For every language there must have been a strong impulse making an impression before there could have been any expression at all. ”

“ Let us get back in everything to the spoken word, even though we have to speak our lyrics to the Psaltery or the Harp, for, as A.E. says, we have begun to forget that literature is but recorded speech, and even when we write with care we have begun ‘to write with elaboration what could never be spoken.’ But when we go back to speech let us see that it is either the idiom of those who have rejected, or of those who have never learned, the base idioms of the newspapers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Again, take the whole question of the imitative use of language. In national literatures many a passage, poetry or prose, is heightened in effect by assonance, alliteration, a certain movement or rhythm of phrase. Subtle suggestion slides in sound through the ear and falls with mellowing cadence into the heart. Soothed senses murmur their own music to the mind ”

“ Not only is perception measurably quite distinctly slower, but book language is related to oral speech somewhat as an herbarium is to a garden, or a museum of stuffed specimens to a menagerie. The invention of letters is a novelty in the history of the race that spoke for countless ages before it wrote. The winged word of mouth is saturated with color, perhaps hot with feeling, musical with inflection, is the utterance of a living present personality, the consummation of man's gregarious instincts. ”

“ The class of small words which were once contemptuously called “particles,” are now acknowledged to be the very bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure of language. Their significance increases just in the degree that a nation thinks acutely and expresses its thought accurately. An uncultivated idiom can do without them; but as soon as a people becomes thoughtful, and wishes to connect and modify its ideas,—in short, to pursue metaphysical inquiries, and to reason logically,—the microscopic parts of [156] speech become indispensable. ”

“ The ear catches the word imperfectly, the lips pronounce it after their own fashion, and the first writer who hears it, sets it down to the best of his ability, to be read, as it may chance, by others, ignorant of the sound the letters were meant to represent, and thus striking out absolute novelties. Even where it travels by the medium of writing, the letters of one language are so inadequate to express the sounds of another, that great changes take place in pronunciation, even while the spelling remains unaltered, and these become visible in the popular contractions. ”

“ The inability of the grammarian to dictate to custom is made especially evident when we consider that thing more subtle than syntax and in composition no less important, which we call Idiom. That a writer shall be idiomatic is as essential to writing well as the avoidance of solecisms, yet every student [Pg 49] of the language knows how elusive and difficult of attainment is a sound understanding of the idioms of any tongue. ”

“ In the next place we may observe that, where the words are not monosyllables, we often make them so, as much as lies in our power, by our rapidity of pronunciation; as it generally happens in most of our long words which are derived from the Latin, where we contract the length of the syllables, that gives them a grave and solemn air in their own language, to make them more proper for despatch, and more conformable to the genius of our tongue. This we may find in a multitude of words, as “liberty,” “conspiracy,” “theatre,” “orator,” &c. ”

“ It is thus that it has become “scientific” to analyze language as itself a commanding element in man’s life. The history of word-roots, their modification under the influences of changes wrought in the vocal organs by habit or by climate, the laws of phonetic change to which they are obedient, and their persistence under all disguises of dialect, as if they13 were full of a self-originated life, a self-directed energy of influence, is united with the study of grammatical forms in the construction of scientific conceptions of the evolution and uses of human speech. ”

“ Now, the naturalists observe, that there is in human noses an idiosyncracy, by virtue of which, the more the passage is obstructed, the more our speech delights to go through, as the music of a flagellet is made by the stops. ”

“ Many readers who know a little Italian or German will confess that their enjoyment of a lyric in those languages suffers only a slight, if any, impairment through their ignorance of the precise meaning of all the words in the poem: if they know enough to feel the predominant mood—as when we listen to a song sung in a language of which we are wholly ignorant—we can sacrifice the succession of exact ideas. For words bare of meaning to the intellect may be covered with veils of emotional association due to the sound alone. ”

“ The reader will understand without explanation that there is in the gesture speech no organized sentence such as is integrated in the languages of civilization, and that he must not look for articles or particles or passive voice or case or grammatic gender, or even what appears in those languages as a substantive or a verb, as a subject or a predicate, or as qualifiers or inflexions. The sign radicals, without being specifically any of our parts of speech, may be all of them in turn. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The more unconscious processes that reflect imitatively the linguistic environment and that strike out intuitively oral and written vents for interests so intense that they must be told and shared, are what teach us how to command the resources of our mother tongue. These prescriptions and corrections and consciousness of the manifold ways of error are never so peculiarly liable to hinder rather than to help as in early adolescence, when the soul has a new content and a new sense for it, and so abhors and is so incapable of precision and propriety of diction. ”

“ In the attempt to trace language to its origin, onomatopoeia, or the imitation of the sounds of animals and of nature, appears not only to have been the chief agent in initiating the growth of language, but it has also served to enrich it from time to time, so that even to this day, poetry and eloquence in a great measure depend on the employment of it. ”

“ As the multitude of names increases in every nation and the immense field of language is filled up—if it ever gets filled up—words by the thousands, fanciful and irregular methods of derivation and composition, come to deviate widely from the primitive character of their roots and lose all analogy or resemblance to sound in the thing signified. It is in such a heterogeneous state that we find words of sound-signs in language. ”

“ The Boldest Metaphor grows tame;
Superlatives abjectly crawl
Back to their lexicon in shame,
And Synonyms in shrieking chorus
Take refuge in the deep Thesaurus.
But language has its Pioneers,
Who seek Fresh Words and Postures new,
Slang rushes in where Syntax fears
To tread—so I for Ade halloo,
And say (with George’s kind permission)
It was “A Heated Proposition.” ”

“ Is it possible that, in the mesmeric trance, the mind in some cases rejects as artificial fabric all the educated conventionality of tongues, and resumes unconsciously the original and genuine dialect of the world? ”

“ We always allow for the words of some persons, for with them a scratch is a wound; a wind, a hurricane; one dollar, a thousand; and all they do in life, a big, big bluster. The only way to bring back English to a state of purity—for it has been outraged by slang, imitation, technical expressions, a straining after long words, and a regular system of exaggeration—is to speak simple words, using all necessary force and emphasis in the voice instead of in the number of syllables, saying what you mean by just the words that will convey the meaning. ”

“ English which is not idiomatic becomes at once formal and lifeless, as if the tongue were already dead and its remains embalmed in those honorable sepulchres, the philological dictionaries. On the other hand, English which goes too far, and fails of a delicate distinction between what is really and essentially idiomatic and what is colloquial, becomes at once vulgar and utterly wanting in that subtle quality of dignity for which there is no better term than distinction. The grammarian, moreover, wageth against Idiom a warfare as bitter as it is unceasing. ”

“ As we saw, “gesture-language has no grammar properly so called;” and we traced in considerable detail the analogies—so singularly numerous and exact—between the forms of sentences as now revealed in gesture and as they first emerged in the early days of speech. In other words, the earliest record that speech is able to yield as to the nature of its own origin, clearly reveals to us this origin as emerging from the yet more primitive language of tone and gesture. For this is the only available explanation of their close family resemblance in the matter of syntax. ”

“ He looked at me malevolently. “I should,” he said, “much more easily and with less mental effort understand, if you in your own tongue speak. I have the English language fluently and idiomatically acquired.” ”

“ The question has been put by psychological grammarians, which one of the senses most helped man in the creation of language—or to express it in modern scientific parlance, was primitive man a visuaire or an auditaire? Did he model his sounds after what he heard, or what he saw? The former opinion has been the more popular, and has given rise to the imitative or “onomatopoetic” theory of language. No doubt there is a certain degree of truth in this, but the analysis of American tongues leans decidedly toward classing primitive man among the visuaires. ”

“ So beautiful indeed is its structure and choice of language that its author’s earlier and later vagaries and erratic indulgences in the most lax or bombastic habits of speech become hopelessly inexplicable. ”

“ For either a word or an idiom, of which the reader is ignorant, brings him to a stop. Now if these belong to foreign tongues, we must either make inquiry about them from men who speak those tongues, or if we have leisure we must learn the tongues ourselves, or we must consult and compare several translators. If, however, there are words or idioms in our own tongue that we are unacquainted with, we gradually come to know them through being accustomed to read or to hear them. ”

“ Speech involves always the power of articulate utterance; we can speak of the language of animals, but not of their speech. A tongue is the speech or language of some one people, country, or race. A dialect is a special mode of speaking a language peculiar to some locality or class, not recognized as in accordance with the best usage; a barbarism is a perversion of a language by ignorant foreigners, or some usage akin to that. Idiom refers to the construction of phrases and sentences, and the way of forming or using words; it is the peculiar mold in which each language casts its thought. ”

“ Another activity of translators is that they superimpose idioms on top of others and occasionally, by straining hard to transfer and to stretch the meaning of words into meanings in other languages, they enhance the elasticity of language. Provided it doesn’t reach the breaking point such an extension of the idiom helps it evolve and broaden itself. The human mind outsizes all idioms. ”

“ Where the rhythm is regular we have poetry and song, where it is irregular the language of ordinary prose. Stress is the great conservator of language; the chief counterpoise to the action of phonetic decay. The accented syllable will be preserved though all the other syllables [295] by which it is surrounded may disappear in pronunciation, just as the idea upon which emphasis is laid will hold out successfully against the attacks of age and forgetfulness. ”