The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn Dead Words That Deserved to Live Joe Shipley is a jaunty chap. You think he is out teaching his high-school students, or attending first nights on Broadway and...
...This was just a verse of the Bible, usually the first verse of the 51st Psalm, the reading of which saved one's neck...
...You think he is out teaching his high-school students, or attending first nights on Broadway and writing his reviews for The New Leader...
...Along with his followers, Wat was not inclined to postpone his utopia to a vague and indefinite future which would follow his conferences with the great powers in London...
...It was Shakespeare who was gayer...
...You would think that during such an evolutionary process the liveliest words would be retained for use, that the gayest and jauntiest sounds would last and the sickly ones would drop away...
...Don't get the idea that this is a dictionary of Old English...
...All of which reminds me of a historical item which must be added on the other side...
...By virtue of the Biblical text," writes our learned scribe, "any person in holy orders brought before a secular court (later, anyone that could read--being thus potentially a cleric) could plead privilege of clergy...
...Wat Tyler was well and unfavorably known in the 14th century...
...He led the great peasant march on London...
...You must have sweated like an ox to throw this thing together...
...There is a funny thing about this compilation...
...As the faith in the holy man's quality faded and his position in society was reduced, the word for the little recitation on which he relied to rescue him from predicaments in court also faded and fell into disuse...
...Any author expects more than that for even a little book--and this one of Joe's had reached gargantuan proportions...
...These are just a lot of English words which have been sloughed off from the language as it has grown along...
...And I would also like to take up the problem of why these old words are livelier than those we use now...
...As the cat proudly purrs, so the dignified and somewhat priestly dramatic critic awaits comment...
...The words and definitions are not stretched out like skeletons on a rack...
...And since, according to his conception, much of the misery of the poor had resulted from written records and from the machinations of those who knew the black arts of calligraphy, the simplest way to clear matters up was to abolish such folks out of hand...
...When I showed it to my wife, she exclaimed instantly: "These words look giddy and gay...
...The Bishop's commissary, always present, pronounced Legit (he reads...
...Now, before this new court of the common people, all that was required was the slightest evidence that a man had been a fellow-traveler with the alphabet—and up he went to the limb of the handiest tree...
...If the problem of retention had been settled by vote rather than by some relentless and mystical law of evolution, the whole process would have gone differently...
...I don't believe the language was gayer in Shakespeare's time...
...I wish I had time to fool around with such words as foolometer, the word for a standard set up to measure foolishness, serendipity, clapper-dudgeon, fructuous, floccify--and so on and on...
...He set things right as well as he could while en route...
...But all the time he has been deceiving you...
...Formerly, the man who could put down scratches with a pen or recite a verse of Scripture had special privileges under the law...
...Some of the changes involved in the death of words have taken place because of turns in customs and social relations...
...These gay words which friend Joe has commemorated would, in many cases, have been preserved--and we can find plenty of dull combinations of letters which could have been sacrificed in their places...
...There was a sort of rude justice involved...
...As late as 1710, there was reprinted in England an old song which gaily recited that a monk could commit murder or rape, but if he could recite the right verse he would not fail to escape...
...And so Joe appears in our office one Wednesday morning with this fat book between his teeth--much like a cat who has concealed her nest and is now in the act of surprising her family with a handsome mess of offspring...
...They fairly squirm and bounce and prance and shine...
...The supposition behind this quirk of the law was, obviously, that the priest or the man who could read would do no wrong...
...You can't just say: "Good God...
...There is, for example, the good old expression neckverse...
...They have dropped off at various times from Chaucer to Bernard Shaw...
...But it is a handsome volume just stuffed with funny vocables...
...So the neckverse was a handy thing in those days...
...It is hard to keep them between their covers...
...This is not a story, a play, a poem, nothing with any describable art form, but it is all alive...
...He has really been hidden in a cave squandering both energy and leisure on an enormous book entitled Dictionary of Early English (Philosophical Library, 753 pp., $10...
...It is concerned, rather, with English words that are old--which is quite a different matter...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 4
