44 



Degraded Words. 



any longer; the peasant is quite dismissed, and the evil moral con- 

 ditions of him who is called by this name alone remain." Thus 

 Barrow rather superciliously remarks that foul language " is termed 

 villainy, as being proper for rustic boors, who, having their minds 

 debased by being conversant in meanest affairs, do vent their sorry 

 passions in such strains." 



The term boor, just quoted, was likewise originally descriptive of 

 nothing worse than " a husbandman," " a plowman," " a country 

 fellow," and the world or its Hollandish representative is still applied, 

 without offense, to the wealthy and presumably well mannered Dutch 

 planters of South Africa. A churl was a free tenant at will, or, as 

 some trace the derivation, only a person of remarkable physical 

 prowess. A kern was a footman or foot-soldier of rural extraction, 

 A pagan was "first a villager, then a heathen villager, lastly a 

 heathen." Heathen itself meant originally only a dweller on the 

 heath or open country. Incivility was merely the customary behavior 

 (in the eyes of city residents), of their somewhat unpolished acquaint- 

 ances from the interior; and the epithet savage indicated for a long 

 time nothing more than relationship to the forest, or at worst a wild 

 or uncultivated state, without the implication of anything like' ferocity. 

 This must have been Milton's conception when he wrote of a " savage 

 hill," and a " savage wilderness ; " and Dryden's too, who speaks of 

 " savage berries of the wood." 



Not only, however, are dwellers in towns addicted to under-esti- 

 mating their brethren of the fields, but the smaller minds of every 

 country are apt to consider their land the flowery kingdom, and to 

 despise unreasonably the outside nations. The j)i'evalence of this 

 folly is well illustrated by the present degradation of the adjective 

 outlandish, which ought of course to mean only foreign, as it plainly 

 did in the seventeenth century, when Translator-General Holland, 

 rendering Pliny into English, made him refer to " outlandish wheat." 

 The uncouth, also,was once merely the unknown or unfamiliar ; a vaga- 

 bond and a harlot was a wanderer or stranger, not necessarily of 

 disreputable character ; and a barbarian, in Greek, was a man of 

 different nationality from the speaker. ' 



Idiot meant originally in English, as in its native tongue, only a 

 private person, or at worst an unlearned man, these two constituting 

 the whole definition given by Bailey, except when used as a technical 

 term in law. Jeremy Taylor, in the middle of the seventeenth cen- 

 tury, remarked that " humility is a duty in great ones as well as in 

 idiots ;" and Blount, a contemporary of the good bishop, says : 



