Degraded Words. 49 



of things we eat — are cases in point. To carouse^ again, was once 

 only to drink, with however great a degree of decorum and pro- 

 priety. " The queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet," so proclaims 

 that august lady in the last scene of the tragedy, referring plainly to 

 the taking of a single glass, by way of formal compliment. But as 

 our affections are so apt to be set upon things that perish with the 

 using, and as the enjoyment of intoxicants has been found so often 

 to degenerate into their lawless and injurious abuse, we have come 

 by degrees to conceive the preposterous notion of " loving " a favorite 

 eatable, and our designation of the slightest possible use of wine has 

 grown so swollen and distorted, like the persons of the depraved 

 beings whose bad habits have brought about the change, as to imply 

 the highest degree of riotous excess. 



The selfish and malevolent passions, too, have been at work upon 

 our vocabulary. Charles Francis Adams, some years ago, took oc- 

 casion to characterize the British nation as greatly " addicted to com- 

 merce," for which expression he was censured by sundry newspapers, 

 on the ground that commerce is no^ a vice. Truly it is not; but why 

 should we never speak of persons or peoples as addicted (or prone^ 

 which is another expression of exactly the same kind) to anything 

 but what is evil? — the words having equally proper application, 

 both by etymology and by the authority of ancient usage, to good 

 practices and to bad. Why, indeed, had not common experience 

 persistently given its testimony in support of something very like 

 the much abused theological doctrine of total depravity, the doctrine 

 that " we are utterly indisposed to all good, and wholly inclined to 

 all evil?" 



Indolence^ again, once signified merely a condition of freedom 

 from pain or excitement, and it would seem that its present parity 

 with laziness must be due to the fact that humankind is not likely 

 greatly to exert itself unless stimulated by the actual presence or 

 the apprehended peril of some sort of discomfort. To be careless^ 

 in Pope's time, was to be free from anxiety, not culpably negligent, 

 as now. " Thus wisely careless, innocently gay," he writes. In its 

 present common language, we seldom consider carelessness wise. 

 Indifference was impartiality, so that it was once a compliment to 

 say of a magistrate that he administered justice indifferently, though 

 we should now infer from the remark that his decisions were thought- 

 less and as likely to be wrong as right. 



To covet means, of course, properly speaking, only to desire 

 \Tran8. a;.] 7 



