Words of the Month - Plain, Honest Witcraft

        Remember the Inkhorn Controversy and how writers and speakers of English were irrationally exuberant about all those wonderful new words they were inventing?  Well, it should come as no surprise that some people began to think things had gotten a little too chaotic in our native tongue.  The reaction took two forms.  One was a Nativist movement, in which scholars made up news words derived from English roots instead of borrowing from ancient and European languages.  And secondly, when the Enlightenment arrived in its bright glow of logic, scholars employed all its new arguments in their attempts to make English rational, ruled, and altogether more like the perfection of Latin.  It was time to lay down the law on the crazy English language.

The raven seems a sober bird, well-suited to represent
the manly strong English language.  (Or did Poe spoil
that image by making the raven into a fulsom and
luscious metaphor?)

        "Right," you say, "And how did that work out for them?"  But you already know the answer: language-watchers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries couldn't tame English any more than anyone else ever has.  But some of their attempts were pretty amusing.

        We'll start with Ralph Lever in 1573, who railed against Inkhorn terms in the midst of the Controversy.  Among the words he chose to use instead were:

    naysay - negation

    yeasay - affirmation

    witcraft - logic  [If this word had caught on just think how many logicians might have been burned at the stake due to careless reading!]

    saywhat - conclusion

        In 1671 controversial theologian Samuel Parker proposed, "Had we but an Act of Parliament to abridge Preachers the use of fulsom and luscious Metaphors, it might perhaps be an effectual Cure of all our present Distempers."  An act of Parliament against metaphor?  Now that's a logical idea!

        Nathaniel Fairfax was a physician and philosopher who talked his walk.  When he published his grand metaphysical opus A Treatise of the Bulk and Selvedge of the World in 1674 he made a point of using his own English-ish coinings instead of all those foreign inkhorn terms.  He argued that "however our smoother tongued Neighbours may put in a claim for those bewitcheries of speech that flow from Gloss and Chimingness; yet I verily believe that there is no tongue under heaven, that goes beyond our English for speaking manly strong and full."  He thought speakers of English should "fetch back some of our own words, that have been justled out in wrong that worse from elsewhere might be hoisted in."  And so he himself did.  Among his more fabulous words:

    allfillingness - immensity

    thingsomeness - reality

    metesome - measurable

    biggen - increase

    bulksomeness – volume or mass

    cleavesomness – divisibility

    meteings – dimensions

    roomthiness – extension in space

    talecraft – arithmetic

And my favorites:

    brain-break – enigma, paradox

    unthroughfaresom - impenetrable

        In his 1776 grammar The Philosophy of Rhetoric, George Campbell proposed another interesting idea to bring some logic to our vocabulary:

     enough/enow - (on an analogy with less/fewer)

        enough should mean degree only, enow was the corresponding word regarding number

        Most of these words sound pretty silly, but don't think that English can't make perfectly successful new words from its own roots.  After all, we have forewords as well as prefaces and handbooks as well as manuals.  This chapter in the history of English, like all the others, just served to add to the depth and richness of our language.

[Picture: Raven, wood block print with chine collé, by AEGN, 2000 (sold out).]