:J4(J emeritus professor j. s. blackie on 



falling on a dry surface. The various forms which it has assumed in its passage 

 through the millions of millions of human mouths during long centuries, from 

 Sanscrit, through all the Teutonic languages, will be found in Skeat. They all 

 signify a dot or spot, or the point that makes it, or the act of making it ; and 

 the last of the large progeny of small dots or points is one which is said to be 

 produced either by native virtue of the academic soil at Oxford, or, as Lord 

 Reay had it, by a peculiar metamorphosis which the rude unkempt Scot some- 

 times undergoes when he is transplanted to that atmosphere compounded 

 curiously of the four elements of Greek, Episcopacy, Aristocracy, and Plutocracy ; 

 so that, to use the language of geologists, a prig is a metamorphic Scot, having 

 in West End estimation the same relation to a normal Scot that a dainty 

 Alderney cow has to a shaggy Highland stirk. This is the bright side of the 

 creature, and the side of course from which he habitually contemplates himself. 

 The dark side is revealed by the etymology which plainly sets him forth as a 

 creature of small points and proprieties — a creature mighty in small matters — 

 a sort of dainty drawing-room pedant — in whom the to o-e^vov of true manhood 

 has been altogether swallowed by the to -rrpeirov of smooth convention, and the 

 to KOfxxfjbv of petty elegance and superficial polish. Opposed to him is the 

 sumph, a creature with neither points nor polish, from the German sump/, a bog, 

 cro[x(f)6<;, porose, a Jop^jz-brainecl animal, whose depth, when he has any, is only 

 a profundity of soft and sinking stupidity. Take now the word bull — not the 

 animal which is kin to Bo, but the Pope's bull, which has nothing to do with 

 the bovine cousinship in which the model Englishman glories. The Latin 

 bulla, as every schoolboy knows, was a sort of boss or knob hung round the neck 

 of patrician boys, and pet lambs sometimes, by fond Romish mamas ; its original 

 meaning was a bubble of water, from bullio, English boil. This round boss or 

 knob, in a leaden avatar, came in the Middle Ages to be attached, as a sort of 

 seal or stamp, to the thundering ordinances which his Holiness of the seven hills 

 used to thunder over Europe largely, in order to crush kings and frighten fools ; 

 hence transferred to the document itself; and as the good old gentleman, with 

 all his infallibility, sometimes blundered, a bull came to signify a blunder ; and 

 as Irishmen are famous for blunders, the little gilded ornament on the baby 

 patrician's neck became metamorphosed into a blunder very closely akin to the 

 bubble out of which the word arose. 



VII. The modifications, in verbal form, which the root underwent, in order 

 to adapt itself to new applications and to acquire new shades of meaning form 

 two classes — those of which the origin and significance are either perfectly 

 plain or can reasonably be presumed, and those of which the significance is 

 altogether unknown, and in all probability not to be recovered. The general rule 

 is, in the words of Horne Tooke : " Nothing in language is arbitrary or conven- 

 tional." Language, like political constitutions and national character, is a growth, 



