Hakding. — On Kerns and Serifs. 95 



Art. VI. — Kerns and Serifs. 

 By R. CouPLAND Harding. 



[Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 23rd September, 1896.] 



Students of language have only of late years fully recog- 

 nised the value of the rarer and more despised words of a 

 language. Among the humbler forms, unknown in literature, 

 but surviving in provincialisms, in slang, and in workmen's 

 technical terms, may be found important key-words, opening 

 up relationships otherwise untraceable. Therefore, to the 

 philologist no word is common or unclean, and he has a just 

 ground of complaint against those lexicographers — and they 

 constitute the majority — who from prudery or fastidiousness 

 as to classical forms pass over not only rare and special words, 

 but many terms quite familiar to every ear in vulgar speech. 

 Not only the student of language but the moralist has ground 

 of complaint, for mock-modesty and pedantry of any kind 

 never tend to elevate, but always to debase, the verbal cur- 

 rency- 

 It is not my intention, however, to touch on any "risky " 

 questions of language. I have to direct attention to two old 

 and curious words in use by all English printers — words 

 which have baffled all etymological research — and to offer 

 some suggestions thereon. I know how dangerous is the 

 ground, and that it savours of presumption to offer any theory 

 upon words which have been the despair of etymologists, with 

 all the equipment that scholarship can give. Therefore I 

 will not be so unwise as to dogmatize, but will confine myself 

 to suggesting what seems a possible and not improbable origin 

 of each of the words in question. 



While every trade and profession has its special lingo, un- 

 intelligible to the uninitiated, the printing trade is specially 

 distinguished for the richness of its technical vocabulary. 

 Several dictionaries and glossaries of the trade have been pub- 

 lished, and I have all of any importance ; but not one^ — not 

 even the latest, the fine work published by the Howard 

 Lockwood Company of Philadelphia in 1891-94— attempts to 

 trace the derivation of the words ; nor is one of them complete, 

 numerous words in common use finding no place as yet in any 

 collection. 



Printers' argot may be divided into two well-defined sec- 

 tions : First, the ancient words, originated by workmen who 

 were one and all classical scholars and members of a recog- 

 nised liberal profession ; secondly, the terms coined by the 

 modern workmen — homely, often coarse, and mostly unmiti- 

 gated slang. In the former class is that curious group of 



