SPECIAL WORDS FOR SEX AND RELATIONSHIP 239 



distant forebears mere animals struggling for food and 

 sexual gratification. Are we to suppose that language 

 with its terminology for relationships and passions waited 

 until those relationships were moulded in their current 

 senses, and those passions refined and purified into the 

 most social virtues and most complex affections ? On 

 the contrary, if we are genuine believers in the doctrine 

 of evolution, we shall seek the origins of nomenclature 

 in those fundamental animal instincts which have been 

 the chief motors of evolutionary change. It is precisely 

 in sex-calls and food-cries that we notice animals first 

 giving to sounds distinguishable weights. Hence it is 

 precisely here that we ought to seek the senses of 

 primitive roots. We shall not then be surprised that so 

 many roots have originally a sexual sense, and are by 

 analogy or association afterwards used for wider house- 

 hold, agricultural, or social occupations. 1 



Accordingly, if we find in the sexual impulse not 

 only the source of a developed terminology for relation- 

 ship, but also the first germs of the social instincts 

 in man, shall we not cease to regard it as "a most 

 unlovely germ of appetite," and recognise it for what 

 it really has been nay, still really is the ultimate 

 basis of the very highest, as well as of the very lowest, 

 phases in human action and human feeling ? The 

 spiritual man who lives in a world si peace, gladness, 



1 A similar evolution may be observed in the language of children. To my 

 infant son I am bappa. But as his nurse used to put a red shawl over him 

 when carried from his nursery to see bappa in the study, a shawl becomes bappa. 

 A hat, which like the shawl covers his head, becomes also bappa ; hence any 

 hat, even in a picture, or any covering, as a lid of a box, is bappa. Next to put 

 on a hat is to go out, hence to ' go bappa ' is to go out in the mail-cart. The 

 original shawl being red, red things, at least for a time, were bappas. Thus 

 the original word has been developed into a complexity of meanings which no 

 philologist could unravel who had not observed the successive stages of growth. 



