Degraded Words. 



51 



is really of course only to pay back, whether good or evil, as to 

 resent is to feel back, whether with gratitude or with anger; and 

 examples of the use of both words in the good sense abound in our 

 earlier literature, particularly in the sermons of the seventeenth 

 century, with whose authors they seem to have been favorite terms. 

 Thus Isaac Barrow strongly enjoins the duty of cultivating resent- 

 ment of our obligations to God," and in another passage remarks 

 that " honor renders a man a faithful resenter of courtesies;" and 

 Edmund Calamy says: "God takes what is done to others as done 

 to himself, and by promise obliges himself to full retaliation." 

 Dryden, too, writing at about the same period, has the statement : 

 "The king expects a return from them, that the kindness which he has 

 shown them may be retaliated on those of his own persuasion." Such 

 expressions grate harshly upon modern ears, but that is because the 

 words have become soiled and polluted by the unworthy purposes 

 to which they have now so long been generally restricted. And the 

 language, let it be noticed, is just so much the poorer in consequence, 

 for we have no exact synonyms with which, for their former and 

 better use, we may replace them. 



y. 



Another unfortunate trait of character whose prevalence is curi- 

 ously illustrated in a similar way, is that suggested by the adjecti^'es 

 meddlesome and officious. To meddle with anything was once 

 merely to concern one's self with it, no implication of any imperti- 

 nence or other impropriety being conveyed. Officious, in Bailey's 

 time, had preserved exactly the meaning of its Latin ancestor, " ready 

 to do one a good office, serviceable, very obliging," and it is in this 

 sense that Titus Andronicus uses it when he says [v, 2] : " Come, 

 come, be every one officious to make this banquet." Pragmatical 

 and husyhody also, though perhaps always involving some degree of 

 censure in their English use, ought certainly by every principle of 

 etymology to be susceptible of an innocent if not a laudatory appli- 

 cation. Pragmatihos means " active, able, business-like or prudent." 

 A busybody is plainly a person who is busy ; and why, in either 

 case, should it always be taken for granted that the individual of 

 whom these terms are predicated is active about business that he 

 might better let alone, unless the common experience of those who 

 have employed the words has taught them that people are for the 

 most part rather more likely to exert themselves in the pursuit of 



