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As everyone knows, words constantly take on new meanings. Since these do not necessarily, nor even usually, obliterate the old ones, we should picture this process not on the analogy of an insect undergoing metamorphoses but rather on that of a tree throwing out new branches, which themselves throw out subordinate branches; in fact, as ramification. The new branches sometimes overshadow and kill the old ones but by no means always. We shall again and again find the earliest senses 9 of a word flourishing for centuries despite a vast overgrowth of later senses which might have been expected to kill them.

The philologist’s dream is to diagrammatise all the meanings of a word so as to have a perfect semantic tree of it; every twig traced to its branch, every branch traced back to the trunk. That this can seldom, if ever, be perfectly achieved does not matter much; all studies end in doubts. But there is apparently some real danger of forgetting that the overwhelming majority of those who use the word neither know nor care anything about the tree. And even those who do know something of it most often use the word without thinking about it. Just in the same way, all men use their muscles when they move but most men do not know or care what muscles they are using; and even anatomists, who do know, are not usually thinking of this during a game of tennis. When we use one word in many different senses we avail ourselves of the results produced by semantic ramification. We can do this successfully without being aware of them.

That is why I cannot agree with Professor Empson’s suggestion[2] that when we say ‘Use your sense, man!’ we are implying that the intellectual effort demanded is as easy as the reception of a sense-impression—in other words that we are using sense (i.e. sense-perception) metaphorically. Particular objections will be found in a later chapter: the ramification which produced for the word sense the two meanings (gumption and sense-perception) is well over two thousand years old, and need not have 10 had anything to do with metaphor. It is handed to the modern speaker ‘on a plate’. And that is the general principle I am here concerned with. If we neglect the semantic history of a word we shall be in danger of attributing to ordinary speakers an individual semantic agility which in reality they neither have nor need. It is perfectly true that we hear very simple people daily using several different senses of one word with perfect accuracy—like a dancer in a complicated dance. But this is not because they understand either the relation between them or their history.

Each new speaker learns his native language chiefly by imitation, partly by those hurried scraps of amateur lexicography which his elders produce in answer to the frequent question ‘What does that mean?’ He does not at first—how should he?—distinguish between different senses of one word and different words. They all have to be learned in the same way. Memory and the faculty of imitation, not semantic gymnastics, enable him to speak about sentences in a Latin exercise and sentences of imprisonment, about a cardboard box and a box at the theatre. He does not even ask which are different words and which merely different senses. Nor, for the most part, do we. How many adults know whether bows of ships and bows taught by the dancing master—or down (a hill) and down (deorsum)—or a boys’ school and a school of porpoises—are accidental homophones (like neat and neat or arms and arms) or products of ramification?

A child may, of course, be philologically minded. If so, it may construct imaginary semantic trees for itself. But 11 it does so to explain the usages it has already learned; the usage is not a result of the theory. As a child I—probably like many others—evolved the theory that a candlestick was so called ‘because it makes the candle stick up’. But that wasn’t why I called it a candlestick. I called it a candlestick because everyone else did.