Wherever thought and taste have fallen to be menials, there the vulgar dwell.How should they gain mastery over language? They are introduced to a vocabulary of some hundred thousand words, which quiver through a million of meanings; the wealth is theirs for the taking, and they are encouraged to be spendthrift by the very excess of what they inherit.The resources of the tongue they speak are subtler and more various than ever their ideas can put to use.So begins the process of assimilation, the edge put upon words by the craftsman is blunted by the rough treatment of the confident booby, who is well pleased when out of many highly-tempered swords he has manufactured a single clumsy coulter.Adozen expressions to serve one slovenly meaning inflate him with the sense of luxury and pomp."Vast," "huge," "immense,""gigantic," "enormous," "tremendous," "portentous," and such-like groups of words, lose all their variety of sense in a barren uniformity of low employ.The reign of this democracy annuls differences of status, and insults over differences of ability or disposition.Thus do synonyms, or many words ill applied to one purpose, begin to flourish, and, for a last indignity, dictionaries of synonyms.
Let the truth be said outright: there are no synonyms, and the same statement can never be repeated in a changed form of words.
Where the ignorance of one writer has introduced an unnecessary word into the language, to fill a place already occupied, the quicker apprehension of others will fasten upon it, drag it apart from its fellows, and find new work for it to do.Where a dull eye sees nothing but sameness, the trained faculty of observation will discern a hundred differences worthy of scrupulous expression.The old foresters had different names for a buck during each successive year of its life, distinguishing the fawn from the pricket, the pricket from the sore, and so forth, as its age increased.Thus it is also in that illimitable but not trackless forest of moral distinctions.Language halts far behind the truth of things, and only a drowsy perception can fail to devise a use for some new implement of description.Every strange word that makes its way into a language spins for itself a web of usage and circumstance, relating itself from whatsoever centre to fresh points in the circumference.No two words ever coincide throughout their whole extent.If sometimes good writers are found adding epithet to epithet for the same quality, and name to name for the same thing, it is because they despair of capturing their meaning at a venture, and so practise to get near it by a maze of approximations.Or, it may be, the generous breadth of their purpose scorns the minuter differences of related terms, and includes all of one affinity, fearing only lest they be found too few and too weak to cover the ground effectively.Of this sort are the so-called synonyms of the Prayer-Book, wherein we "acknowledge and confess" the sins we are forbidden to "dissemble or cloke;" and the bead-roll of the lawyer, who huddles together "give, devise, and bequeath," lest the cunning of litigants should evade any single verb.The works of the poets yield still better instances.When Milton praises the VIRTUOUSYOUNG LADY of his sonnet in that the spleen of her detractors moves her only to "pity and ruth," it is not for the idle filling of the line that he joins the second of these nouns to the first.Rather he is careful to enlarge and intensify his meaning by drawing on the stores of two nations, the one civilised, the other barbarous;and ruth is a quality as much more instinctive and elemental than pity as pitilessness is keener, harder, and more deliberate than the inborn savagery of ruthlessness.
It is not chiefly, however, for the purposes of this accumulated and varied emphasis that the need of synonyms is felt.There is no more curious problem in the philosophy of style than that afforded by the stubborn reluctance of writers, the good as well as the bad, to repeat a word or phrase.When the thing is, they may be willing to abide by the old rule and say the word, but when the thing repeats itself they will seldom allow the word to follow suit.Akind of interdict, not removed until the memory of the first occurrence has faded, lies on a once used word.The causes of this anxiety for a varied expression are manifold.Where there is merely a column to fill, poverty of thought drives the hackney author into an illicit fulness, until the trick of verbiage passes from his practice into his creed, and makes him the dupe of his own puppets.A commonplace book, a dictionary of synonyms, and another of phrase and fable equip him for his task; if he be called upon to marshal his ideas on the question whether oysters breed typhoid, he will acquit himself voluminously, with only one allusion (it is a point of pride) to the oyster by name.He will compare the succulent bivalve to Pandora's box, and lament that it should harbour one of the direst of ills that flesh is heir to.He will find a paradox and an epigram in the notion that the darling of Apicius should suffer neglect under the frowns of AEsculapius.
Question, hypothesis, lamentation, and platitude dance their allotted round and fill the ordained space, while Ignorance masquerades in the garb of criticism, and Folly proffers her ancient epilogue of chastened hope.When all is said, nothing is said; and Montaigne's QUE SCAIS-JE, besides being briefer and wittier, was infinitely more informing.
But we dwell too long with disease; the writer nourished on thought, whose nerves are braced and his loins girt to struggle with a real meaning, is not subject to these tympanies.He feels no idolatrous dread of repetition when the theme requires, it, and is urged by no necessity of concealing real identity under a show of change.Nevertheless he, too, is hedged about by conditions that compel him, now and again, to resort to what seems a synonym.
