V · The Century Vocabulary Builder

The Century Vocabulary Builder · Chapter 6V

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Individual Words: As Members of Verbal Families

Our investigation into the nature, qualities, and fortunes of single words must now merge into a study of their family connections. We do not go far into this new phase of our researches before we perceive that the career of a word may be very complicated. Most people, if you asked them, would tell you that an individual word is a causeless entity—a thing that was never begotten and lacks power to propagate. They would deny the possibility that its course through the world could be other than colorless, humdrum. Now words thus immaculately conceived and fatefully impotent, words that shamble thus listlessly through life, there are. But many words are born in an entirely normal way; have a grubby boyhood, a vigorous youth, and a sober maturity; marry, beget sons and daughters, become old, enfeebled, even senile; and suffer neglect, if not death. In their advanced age they are exempted by the discerning from enterprises that call for a lusty agility, but are drafted into service by those to whom all levies are alike. Indeed in their very prime of manhood their vicissitudes are such as to make them seem human. Some rise in the world some sink; some start along the road of grandeur or obliquity, and then backslide or reform. Some are social climbers, and mingle in company where verbal dress coats are worn; some are social degenerates, and consort with the ragamuffins and guttersnipes of language. Some marry at their own social level, some above them, some beneath; some go down in childless bachelorhood or leave an unkempt and illegitimate progeny. And if you trace their own lineage, you will find for some that it is but decent and middle-class, for some that it is mongrelized and miscegenetic, for some that it is proud, ancient, yea perhaps patriarchal.

It is contrary to nature for a word, as for a man, to live the life of a hermit. Through external compulsion or internal characteristics a word has contacts with its fellows. And its most intimate, most spontaneous associations are normally with its own kindred.

In our work hitherto we have had nothing to say of verbal consanguinity. But we have not wholly ignored its existence, for the very good reason that we could not. For example, in the latter portions of Chapter IV we proceeded on the hypothesis that at least some words have ancestors. Also in the analysis of the dictionary definition of tension we learned that the word has, not only a Latin forebear, but French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian kinsmen as well. One thing omitted from that analysis would have revealed something further—namely, that the word has its English kinfolks too. For the bracketed part of the dictionary definition mentions two other English words, tend and tense, which from their origin involve the same idea as that of tension— the idea of stretching.

Now words may be akin in either of two ways. They may be related in blood. Or they may be related by marriage. Let us consider these two kinds of connection more fully.

As an illustration of blood kinships enjoyed by a native English word take the adjective good. We can easily call to mind other members of its family: goodly, goodish, goody-goody, good-hearted, good-natured, good- humored, good-tempered, goods, goodness, goodliness, gospel (good story), goodby, goodwill, goodman, goodwife, good-for-nothing, good den (good evening), the Good Book. The connection between these words is obvious.

Next consider a group of words that have been naturalized: scribe, prescribe, ascribe, proscribe, transcribe, circumscribe, subscriber, indescribable, scribble, script, scripture, postscript, conscript, rescript, manuscript, nondescript, inscription, superscription, description. It is clear that these words are each other's kith and kin in blood, and that the strain or stock common to all is scribe or (as sometimes modified) script. What does this strain signify? The idea of writing. The scribes are a writing clan. Some of them, to be sure, have strayed somewhat from the ancestral calling, for words are as wilful—or as independent—as men. Ascribe, for example, does not act like a member of the household of writers, whatever it may look like. We should have to scrutinize it carefully or consult the record for it in that verbal Who's Who, the dictionary, before we could understand how it came by its scribal affiliations honestly. But once we begin to reflect or to probe, we find we have not mistaken its identity. Ascribe is the offspring of ad (to) and scribo (write), both Latin terms. It originally meant writing to a person's name or after it (that is, imputing to the person by means of written words) some quality or happening of which he was regarded as the embodiment, source, or cause. Nowadays we may saddle the matter on him through oral rather than written speech. That is, ascribe has largely lost the writing traits. But all the same it is manifestly of the writing blood.

The scribes are of undivided racial stock, Latin. Consider now the manu, or man, words which sprang from the Latin manus, meaning "hand." Here are some of them: manual, manoeuver, mandate, manacle, manicure, manciple, emancipate, manage, manner, manipulate, manufacture, manumission, manuscript, amanuensis. These too are children of the same father; they are brothers and sisters to each other. But what shall we say of legerdemain (light, or sleight, of hand), maintain, coup de main, and the like? They bear a resemblance to the man's and manu's, yet one that casual observers would not notice. Is there kinship between the two sets of words? There is. But not the full fraternal or sororal relation. The mains are children of manus by a French marriage he contracted. With this French blood in their veins, they are only half-brothers, half-sisters of the manu's and the man's.

Your examination of the family trees of words will be practical, rather than highly scholastic, in nature. You need not track every word in the dictionary to the den of its remote parentage. Nor need you bother your head with the name of the distant ancestor. But in the case of the large number of words that have a numerous kindred you should learn to detect the inherited strain. You will then know that the word is the brother or cousin of certain other words of your acquaintance, and this knowledge will apprise you of qualities in it with which you should reckon. To this extent only must you make yourself a student of verbal genealogy.

EXERCISE - Blood

(Simple exercises in tracing blood relationships among words are given at the end of the chapter. Therefore the exercises assigned here are of a special character.)

1. Each of the following groups is made up of related words, but the relationship is somewhat disguised. Consult the dictionary for each word, and learn all you can as to (a) its source, (b) the influence (as passing through an intermediate language) that gave it its present form, (c) the course of its development into its present meaning.

Captain Cathedral Governor Capital Chaise Gubernatorial Decapitate Chair Chef Shay Guardian Chieftain Ward Camp Cavalry Campaign Guarantee Chivalry Champion Warrant

Camera Inept Incipient Chamber Apt Receive

Serrated Inimical Poor Sierra Enemy Pauper

Influence Espionage Work Influenza Spy Wrought Playwright Isolate Insular

2. The variety of sources for modern English is indicated by the following list. Do not seek for blood kinsmen of these particular words, but think of all the additional words you can that have come into English from Indian, Spanish, French, any other language spoken today.

Alphabet (Greek) Piano (Italian) Folio (Latin) Car (Norman) Boudoir (French) Rush (German) Binnacle (Portuguese) Sky (Icelandic) Anger (Old Norse) Yacht (Dutch) Isinglass (Low German) Hussar (Hungarian) Slogan (Celtic) Samovar (Russian) Polka (Polish) Chess (Persian) Shekel (Hebrew) Tea (Chinese) Algebra (Arabic) Kimono (Japanese) Puttee (Hindoo) Tattoo (Tahitian) Boomerang (Australian) Voodoo (African) Potato (Haytian) Skunk (American Indian) Guano (Peruvian) Buncombe (American) Renegade (Spanish)

That words marry and are given in marriage, is too generally overlooked. Any student of a foreign language, German for instance, can recall the thrill of discovery and the lift of reawakened hope that came to him when first he suspected, aye perceived, the existence of verbal matrimony. For weeks he had struggled with words that apparently were made up of fortuitous collocations of letters. Then in some beatific moment these huddles of letters took meaning; in instance after instance they represented, not a word, but words—a linguistic household. Let them be what they might—a harem, the domestic establishment of a Mormon, the dwelling-place of verbal polygamists,—he could at last see order in their relationships. To their morals he was indifferent, absorbed as he was in his joy of understanding.

In English likewise are thousands of these verbal marriages. We may not be aware of them; from our very familiarity with words we may overlook the fact that in instances uncounted their oneness has been welded by a linguistic minister or justice of the peace. But to read a single page or harken for thirty seconds to oral discourse with our minds intent on such states of wedlock is to convince ourselves that they abound. Consider this list of everyday words: somebody, already, disease, vineyard, unskilled, outlet, nevertheless, holiday, insane, resell, schoolboy, helpmate, uphold, withstand, rainfall, deadlock, typewrite, football, motorman, thoroughfare, snowflake, buttercup, landlord, overturn. Every term except one yokes a verbal husband with his wife, and the one exception (nevertheless) joins a uxorious man with two wives.

These marriages are of a simple kind. But the nuptial interlinkings between families of words may be many and complicated. Thus there is a family of graph (or write) words: graphic, lithograph, cerograph, cinematograph, stylograph, telegraph, multigraph, seismograph, dictograph, monograph, holograph, logograph, digraph, autograph, paragraph, stenographer, photographer, biographer, lexicographer, bibliography, typography, pyrography, orthography, chirography, calligraphy, cosmography, geography. There is also a family of phone (or sound) words: telephone, dictaphone, megaphone, audiphone, phonology, symphony, antiphony, euphonious, cacophonous, phonetic spelling. It chances that both families are of Greek extraction. Related to the graphs—their cousins in fact—are the grams: telegram, radiogram, cryptogram, anagram, monogram, diagram, logogram, program, epigram, kilogram, ungrammatical. Now a representative of the graphs married into the phone family, and we have graphophone. A representative of the phones married into the graph family, and we have phonograph. A representative of the grams married into the phone family, and we have gramophone. A representative of the phones married into the gram family, and we have phonogram. Of such unions children may be born. For example, from the marriage of Mr. Phone with Miss Graph were born phonography, phonographer, phonographist (a rather frail child), phonographic, phonographical, and phonographically.

Intermarriage between the phones and the graphs or grams is a wedding of equals. Some families of words, however, are of inferior social standing to other families, and may seek but not hope to be sought in marriage. Compare the ex's with the ports. An ex, as a preposition, belongs to a prolific family but not one of established and unimpeachable dignity. Hence the ex's, though they marry right and left, lead the other words to the altar and are never led thither themselves. Witness exclude, excommunicate, excrescence, excursion, exhale, exit, expel, expunge, expense, extirpate, extract; in no instance does ex fellow its connubial mate—it invariably precedes. The ports, on the other hand, are the peers of anybody. Some of them choose to remain single: port, porch, portal, portly, porter, portage. Here and there one marries into another family: portfolio, portmanteau, portable, port arms. More often, however, they are wooed than themselves do the pleading: comport, purport, report, disport, transport, passport, deportment, importance, opportunity, importunate, inopportune, insupportable. From our knowledge of the two families, therefore, we should surmise that if any marriage is to take place between them; an ex must be the suitor. The surmise would be sound. There is such a term as export, but not as portex.

Now it is oftentimes possible to do business with a man without knowing whether he is a man or a bridal couple. And so with a word. But the knowledge of his domestic state and circumstances will not come amiss, and it may prove invaluable. You may find that you can handle him to best advantage through a sagacious use of the influence of his wife.

EXERCISE - Marriage

1. For each word in the lists of EXERCISE - Dictionary and Activity 1 for EXERCISE - Past, determine (a) whether it is single or married; (b) if it is married, whether the wedding is one between equals.

2. Make a list of the married words in the first three paragraphs of the selection from Burke (Appendix 2). For each of these words determine the exact nature and extent of the dowry brought by each of the contracting parties to the wedding.

Hitherto in our study of verbal relationships we have usually started with the family. Having strayed (as by good luck) into an assembly of kinsmen, we have observed the common strain and the general characteristics, and have then "placed" the individual with reference to these. But we do not normally meet words, any more than we meet men, in the domestic circle. We meet them and greet them hastily as they hurry through the tasks of the day, with no other associates about them than such as chance or momentary need may dictate. If we are to see anything of their family life, it must be through effort we ourselves put forth. We must be inquisitive about their conjugal and blood relationships.

How, then, starting with the individual word, can you come into a knowledge of it, not in its public capacity, but in what is even more important, its personal connections? You must form the habit of asking two questions about it: (1) Is it married? (2) Of what family or families was it born? If you can get an understanding answer to these two questions, an answer that will tell you what its relations stand for as well as what their name is, your inquiries will be anything but bootless.

Let us illustrate your procedure concretely. Suppose you read or hear the word conchology. It is a somewhat unusual word, but see what you can do with it yourself before calling on the dictionary to help you. Observe the word closely, and you will obtain the answer to your first question. Conchology is no bachelor, no verbal old maid; it is a married pair.

Your second and more difficult task awaits you; you must ascertain the meaning of the family connections. With Mr. Conch you are on speaking terms; you know him as one of the shells. But the utmost you can recall about his wife is that she is one of a whole flock of ologies. What significance does this relationship possess? You are uncertain. But do not thumb the dictionary yet. Pass in mental review all the ologies you can assemble. Wait also for the others that through the unconscious operations of memory will tardily straggle in. Be on the lookout for ologies as you read, as you listen. In time you will muster a sizable company of them. And you will draw a conclusion as to the meaning of the blood that flows through their veins. Ology implies speech or study. Conchology, then, must be the study of conches.

Your investigations thus far have done more than teach you the meaning of the word you began with. They have brought you some of the by-products of the study of verbal kinships. For you no longer pass the ologies by with face averted or bow timidly ventured. You have become so well acquainted with them that even a new one, wherever encountered, would flash upon you the face of a friend. But now your desires are whetted. You wish to find out how much you can learn. You at last consult the dictionary.

Here a huge obstacle confronts you. The ologies, like the ports (above), are a haughty clan; they are the wooed, rather than the wooing, members of most marital households that contain them. Now the marriage licenses recorded in the dictionary are entered under the name of the suitor, not of the person sought. Hence you labor under a severe handicap as you take the census of the ologies. Let us imagine the handicap the most severe possible. Let us suppose that no ology had ever been the suitor. Even so, you would not be entirely baffled. For you could look up in the dictionary the ologies you your self had been able to recall. To what profit? First, you could verify or correct your surmise as to what the ological blood betokens. Secondly, you could perhaps obtain cross-references to yet other ologies than those you remembered.

But you are not reduced to these extremities. The ologies, arrogant as they are, sometimes are the applicants for matrimony, and the marriage registry of the dictionary so indicates. To be sure, they do not, when thus appearing at the beginning of words, take the form ology. They take the form log. But you must be resourceful enough to keep after your quarry in spite of the omission of a vowel or two. Also from some lexicons you may obtain still further help. You may find ology, logy, logo, or log listed as a combining form, its meaning given, and examples of its use in compounds cited.

By your zeal and persistence you have now brought together a goodly array of the ologies—all or most, let us say, of the following: conchology, biology, morphology, phrenology, physiology, osteology, histology, zoology, entomology, bacteriology, ornithology, pathology, psychology, cosmology, eschatology, demonology, mythology, theology, astrology, archeology, geology, meteorology, mineralogy, chronology, genealogy, ethnology, anthropology, criminology, technology, doxology, anthology, trilogy, philology, etymology, terminology, neologism, phraseology, tautology, analogy, eulogy, apology, apologue, eclogue, monologue, dialogue, prologue, epilogue, decalogue, catalogue, travelogue, logogram, logograph, logo-type, logarithms, logic, illogical. (Moreover you may have perceived in some of these words the kinship which exists in all for the loquy group—see (1) Soliloquy below.) Of course you will discard some items from this list as being too learned for your purposes. But you will observe of the others that once you know the meaning of ology, you are likely to know the whole word. Thus from your study of conchology you have mastered, not an individual term, but a tribe.

In conchology only one element, ology, was really dubious at the outset. Let us take a word of which both elements give you pause. Suppose your thought is arrested by the word eugenics. You perhaps know the word as a whole, but not its components. For by looking at it and thinking about it you decide that its state is married, that it comprises the household of Mr. Eu and his wife, formerly Miss Gen. But you cannot say offhand just what kind of person either Mr. Eu or the erstwhile Miss Gen is likely to prove.

Have you met any of the Eu's elsewhere? You think vaguely that you have, but cannot lay claim to any real acquaintance. To the dictionary you accordingly betake yourself. There you find that Mr. Eu is of a family quite respectable but not prone to marriage. Euphony, eupepsia, euphemism, euthanasia are of his retiring kindred. The meaning of the eu blood, so the dictionary informs you, is well. The gen blood, as you see exemplified in gentle, general, genital, engender, carries with it the idea of begetting, of producing, of birth, or (by extension) of kinship. Eugenics, then, is an alliance of well and begotten (or born).

Your immediate purpose is fulfilled; but you resolve, let us say, to make the acquaintance of more of the gens, whose number you have perceived to be legion. You are duly introduced to the following: genus, generic, genre, gender, genitive, genius, general, Gentile, gentle, gentry, gentleman, genteel, generous, genuine, genial, congeniality, congener, genital, congenital, engender, generation, progeny, progenitor, genesis, genetics, eugenics, pathogenesis, biogenesis, ethnogeny, palingenesis, unregenerate, degenerate, monogeny, indigenous, exogenous, homogeneous, heterogeneous, genealogy, ingenuous, ingenious, ingenue, engine, engineer, hygiene, hydrogen, oxygen, endogen, primogeniture, philoprogeniture, miscegenation. Some of these are professional rather than social; you decide not to leave your card at their doors. Others have assumed a significance somewhat un_gen_-like, though the relationship may be traced if you are not averse to trouble, Thus engine in its superficial aspects seems alien to the idea of born. But it is the child of ingenious (innate, inborn); ingenious is the inborn power to accomplish, and engine is the result of the application of that power. Whether you care to bother with such subtleties or not, enough gens are left to make the family one well worth your cultivation.

Thus by studying two words, conchology and eugenics, you have for the first time placed yourself on an intimate footing with three verbal families—the ologies, the eu's, and the gens. Observe that though you studied the ologies apart from the eu's and the gens, your knowledge—once you have acquired it—cannot be kept pigeonholed, for the ologies have intermarried with both the other families. Hence you on meeting eulogy can exclaim: "How do you do, Mr. Eu? I am honored in making your acquaintance, Mrs. Eu—I was about to call you by your maiden name; for I am a friend of your sister, the Miss Ology who married Mr. Conch. And you too, Mr. Eu—I cannot regard you as a stranger. I have looked in so often on the family of your brother—the Euphony family, I mean. What a beautiful literary household it is! Yet it has been neglected by the world-yea, even by the people who write. Well, the loss is theirs who do the neglecting." And genealogy you can greet with an equal parade of family lore: "Don't trouble to tell me who you are. I am hob and nob with your folks on both sides of the family, and my word for it, the relationship is written all over you. Mr. Gen, I envy you the pride you must feel in the prominence given nowadays to the eugenics household. And it must delight you, Miss Ology-that-was, that connoisseurs are so keenly interested in conchology. How are Grandfather Gen and Grandmother Ology? They were keeping up remarkably the last time I saw them." Do you think words will not respond to cordiality like this? They will work their flattered heads off for you!

EXERCISE - Relationships

1. For each of the following words (a) determine what families are intermarried, (b) ascertain the exact contribution to the household by each family represented, and (c) make as complete a list as possible of cognate words.

Reject Oppose Convent Defer Omit Produce Expel

2. Test the extent of the intermarriages among these words by successively attaching each of the prefixes to each of the main (or key) syllables. (Thus re-ject, re-fer, re-pel, etc.)

In tracing verbal kinships you must be prepared for slight variations in the form of the same key-syllable. Consider these words: wise, wiseacre, wisdom, wizard, witch, wit, unwitting, to wit, outwit, twit, witticism, witness, evidence, providence, invidious, advice, vision, visit, vista, visage, visualize, envisage, invisible, vis-à-vis, visor, revise, supervise, improvise, proviso, provision, view, review, survey, vie, envy, clairvoyance. Perhaps the last six should be disregarded as too exceptional in form to be clearly recognized. And certainly some words, as prudence from providentia, are so metamorphosed that they should be excluded from practical lists of this kind. But even in the words left to us there are fairly marked divergences in appearance. Why? Because the key-syllable has descended to us, not through one language, but through several. As good verbal detectives we should be able to penetrate the consequent disguises; for wis, wiz, wit, vid, vic, and vis all embody the idea of seeing or knowing.

On the other hand, you must take care not to be misled by a superficial resemblance into thinking two unrelated key-syllables identical. Let us consider two sets of words. The first, which is related to the tain group (see <Tain> below), has a key-syllable that means holding: tenant, tenement, tenure, tenet, tenor, tenable, tenacious, contents, contentment, lieutenant, maintenance, sustenance, countenance, appurtenance, detention, retentive, pertinacity, pertinent, continent, abstinence, continuous, retinue. The second has a key-syllable that means stretching: tend, tender, tendon, tendril, tendency, extend, subtend, distend, pretend, contend, attendant, tense, tension, pretence, intense, intensive, ostensible, tent, tenterhook, portent, attention, intention, tenuous, attenuate, extenuate, antenna, tone, tonic, standard. The form of the key-syllable for the first set of words is usually ten, tent, or tin; that for the second tend, tens, tent, or ten. You may therefore easily confuse the two groups until you have learned to look past appearances into meanings. Thenceforth the holdings and the stretchings will be distinct in your mind—will constitute two great families, not one. Of course individual words may still puzzle you. You will not perceive that tender, for example, belongs with the stretchings until you go back to its primary idea of something stretched thin, or that tone has membership in that family until you connect it with the sound which a stretched chord emits.