Читать книгу A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies - Mrs. (Anna) Jameson - Страница 79

Montaigne, in his eloquent tirade against melancholy, observes that the Italians have the same word, Tristezza, for melancholy and for malignity or wickedness. The noun Tristo, “a wretch,” has the double sense of our English word corresponding with the French noun misérable. So Judas Iscariot is called quel tristo. Our word “wretchedness” is not, however, used in the double sense of tristezza.

“On ne considère pas assez les paroles comme des faits:” that was well said!

Since for the purpose of circulation and intercommunication we are obliged to coin truth into words, we should be careful not to adulterate the coin, to keep it pure, and up to the original standard of significance and value, that it may be reconvertible into the truth it represents.

If I use a term in a sense wherein I know it is not understood by the person I address, then I am guilty of using words (in so far as they represent truth), if not to ensnare intentionally, yet to mislead consciously; it is like adulterating coin.

“Common people,” said Johnson, “do not accurately adapt their words to their thoughts, nor their thoughts to the objects;”—that is to say, they neither apprehend truly nor speak truly—and in this respect children, half-educated women, and ill-educated men, are the “common people.”

It is one of the most serious mistakes in Education that we are not sufficiently careful to habituate children to the accurate use of words. Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth. If we looked into the matter we should probably find that all the varieties and modifications of conscious and unconscious lying—as exaggeration, equivocation, evasion, misrepresentation—might be traced to the early misuse of words; therefore the contemptuous, careless tone in which people say sometimes “words—words—mere words!” is unthinking and unwise. It tends to debase the value of that which is the only medium of the inner life between man and man: “Nous ne sommes hommes, et nous ne tenons les uns aux autres, que par la parole,” said Montaigne.