‘involuntary servitude.’ New habits stand in need of new words; one verb, that has come to us within the last four years from the American mint, is ‘to interview.’ Nothing can better express the spirit of our age, ever craving to hear something new; the verb calls up before us a queer pair: on the one side stands the great man, not at all sorry at the bottom of his heart that the rest of mankind are to learn what a fine fellow he is; on the other side fussily hovers the pressman, a Boswell who sticks at nothing in the way of questioning, but who outdoes his Scotch model in being wholly unshackled by any weak feeling of veneration. This Nineteenth Century of ours is a grand age of inventions. Thus we know to our cost what a Sensation Novel means; yet Mr. Edgeworth, writing in 1808, lets us see that the word sensation in his day was wholly confined to France (Memoirs, p. 192). Now and then innovators make a lucky hit. ‘Why so much weep?’ (fletus) asked Artemus Ward; he little knew that he was reviving the Old English word wóp.[1] It is well known that phrases, called Americanisms, are often relics of a remote age. Thus, where an Englishman resolves to do a thing, an American concludes to do it. Yet, in an account of the battle of St. Albans (written in 1455), we read that the King and Lords ‘kept resydens, concludyng to holde the
- ↑ Philology crops up in strange places; I once heard a clown in a circus propound the question, ‘If you may say I freeze, I froze, why not also say I sneeze, I snoze?’ Yet he most likely never heard of Strong and Weak Verbs, or as the vile English Grammars of old used to call them, Irregular and Regular Verbs. We may remember that Wamba the son of Witless plays the philologer in the opening scene of Ivanhoe.
