Belt and Button

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

I WONDER if any readers of the Atlantic will sympathize with me in liking and disliking certain words for their own sake, with a kind of personal feeling. Just as one enjoys or dislikes encountering certain acquaintances from something in themselves, apart from the transactions in which they are encountered, so there are certain words which it makes me feel better to see, hear, or use; and others which produce exactly the opposite effect.

I do not mean the dislike I have to certain words as ugly and intensive aliens (“furriners” expresses the feeling) which seem taken up by a sort of fad, without any necessity derived from a want in our own tongue. Macaulay has justly commented on the offensiveness of Dryden’s putting “fraicheur” for “freshness.” But my special aversions in this way are aliens masquerading as natives, and presenting a mien neither one thing nor the other.

“ Pedagogy! ” What self-respecting teachers can desire their noble calling travestied by this name, uncouth to look at, and uncouth to say, misused Greek passing through unnatural German into bad English! Every one who studies Greek — but that we are told nowadays we should not — knows that a “pedagogue ” is not a schoolmaster at all, but the slave who escorted boys to and from school to guard them from immoral associates. One may forgive “pedagogue ” in consideration of its always having a certain air of joke, — it just suits Shakespeare’s Holofernes. But to think there is any technical propriety in calling the art or science of teaching pedagogy ! Granting that we must have a Greek name for a science, the proper word is pædeuties, more accurate at once and more euphonious.

And “silhouetted.” Are we to be saddled forever with this needless coinage from a French word, which in its own language is remarkably like slang ? Every writer seems bound to haul it in by main force. A lover of nature, kept in all day by the raging sun, goes out at the softer hours to gaze on a line of mountain peaks, standing in dark outline against the golden glow of sunset, — and he must needs dub them “ silhouetted ! ” A French noun violently turned into an English participial adjective, — and to what end ? with what profit ? A recent writer speaks of General Grant’s and General Sherman’s profiles “en silhouette.” Why not say that their hats were “en chapeau, ” and their trousers “en pantalon”? The Matterhorn, that awful monster that looks down on Zermatt to see what new climber it may devour, to be spoken of as “parsimonious-French-ministered ” against the deep blue !

No! I refer to pure English words, — words we use every day, and cannot possibly dispense with, slipping as they do from our mouths without effort; yet which to me are not mere tokens of thought, but friends and enemies. “Button.” I cannot hear or use this word without feeling fidgety. It reminds me of the days when I knew I was a boy, and was treated as a child; when I was dressed and undressed by female hands, and taunted by my elder brother, who dressed himself; a slave and victim to a mass of needless and sordid details in nursery life, devised by a bevy of empresses to exalt their own autocracy and circumscribe my manly liberty. Oh, how blest and exalted in those days seemed to me savages, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, anybody who was not confined by buttons ; such an earthborn word. In Scott’s magnificent picture of the chivalrous James IV. there is to me a note of repulsion when I read

Couldn’t Sir Walter have made it a stud, or “knop, ” or anything but a button, — a base thing of horn or bone or cloth — not of ruby ?

“Belt.” There’s a word for you! A grand, manly, classic, chivalrous, athletic word; the symbol of emancipation, of dressing yourself, of the “toga,” or rather the “tunica virilis.” There is richness and energy in the very sound, the very look. It suggests a man, all succinct and equipped whether for fields of peace or fields of war; his needful garments confined and supported by a band to be proud of. In contrast to the monarch described above, how thoroughly satisfactory is Lord William Howard, as he advances — fifty years too soon, indeed — to the siege of Branksome, —

Gallant John Gilpin trasted to both belt and button; and how much more faithful was the former than the latter! Truly, to one who appreciates the whole force of language words may be enemies or friends.