Profaned Words

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

MR. LODGE has recently assured the world that Theodore Roosevelt was in no sense a ‘profane’ man. It is a great satisfaction to have this fact established in the minds of posterity by so eminent a witness. Otherwise, certain of Mr. Roosevelt’s more violent epithets might become the quarry of misguided philologists, and serve as a basis for reinterpretation. It might come to be believed that the distinguished President had mingled with the lower sort, prize-fighters for example, and lost that emotional restraint which marked the gentlemen of his day.

I fancy that, if Mr. Roosevelt was not, in any sense, a profane man, it was because he was generally master of a more precise idiom than the language of profanity. Poems are born of the emotional exigency, as Wordsworth discovered. But how frequent the emotional exigency of which no poem is born — or any humbler utterance, unless an oath? We are often grateful for mere prose if the exigency is extreme, as in the winter of 1919-20, when Mr. Wilson pronounced the busy-ness of the Senate to be ‘supererogatory.’ We did not know what it meant, but we had observed the Senate. Any word not encumbered with a meaning would do. From the mouldy depths of lexicographic desuetude it came: ‘Supererogatory’ — that was the Senate and the Senate was that!

Will posterity count it a profane word? Who shall say? Any pebble shied at so august a body has about it an aspect of profanity. But posterity will not enjoy the frisson that attended its rebirth, its reinstatement in the language — not, perhaps, of the street — but of the volatile suburb. The supererogatory Senate !

I looked it up in the dictionary. It was right as far as it went; but somehow, I had expected more of it. Then, as frequently, I was tempted by the philosophy of Humpty Dumpty. If only words would mean exactly what we wish them to! Let the dictionary go by the board and printing become a series of gestures — conveying, inversely as the square root of their brevity, the pent emotions of mankind. To be sure, nobody would understand us. But nobody understands us anyway! So what of that?

Take the word ‘Bezonian,’ for example, which means a vulgar hind. Thanks to Jefferson, it is a term of opprobrium now, in so far as it is understood. But if we want to put the ‘powerful Katrinka’ in her place,— and especially, to relieve our feelings without injury to hers, — it is not altogether a disadvantage that the word is little understood. She may think you are calling her a beautiful Amazon, and turn from following after contrariety.

One’s experiences on the other side of the fence — the bright realm of ignorance — are frequently delightful, while they last. I remember as a child having settled several theological questions very satisfactorily without recourse to the authorities, and frequently without any real perplexity; as with the phrase: ‘And I will send you another Comforter.’ A species of down puff, I argued, of which, in an intemperate climate, one could not have too many. I have since learned that the Comforter is identified with the Paraclete, or the third Member of the Trinity, or, in other words, the Holy Ghost. The ‘other words’ do not help particularly; it is an entity which becomes less intelligible the more it is explained.

But my childish fancy had already disposed of the Holy Ghost. In the normal Sunday-morning congregation, every third or fourth person habitually leaned his forehead on the adjacent pew during the prayer, the rest remaining erect, with folded hands and bowed head. Emulation did not prevent me from observing this demonstration of piety, which so impressed me that I never doubted these were holy ghosts; especially as the clergyman always employed the expression at this juncture in the ceremonies. I have never since found a suitable means for recording this distinction among the devotees.

My saddest experience, however, was with the word ‘maverick,’ which a sheltering environment withheld from my cognizance until quite recently. I believe that one member of the Roosevelt family is reported to have applied it, as a term of opprobrium, to another, in a not very intelligible context. The impulse of incurable folly drove me to inquire its meaning. I am the poorer for my pains.

Already associations had gathered in my mind about the word, which caused my informant some amusement, but caused me infinitely more. Great, as Humpty Dumpty discovered, are the resources of an unbiased mind. The word had suggested to me a romantic and sentimental fowl, dwelling with all the other un-American birds — poor things! — in the wildernesses of poesy. I longed to hear him in a ballad as, for example: —

For some reason I am sure there would be a great many mavericks for every finch. It is a bird of luxuriant growth, a child of the rank tropics, and cousin to the bul-bul; the English sparrow of romance.

The merles and mavericks would be more or less dependable, like the decorations on a Christmas tree; while the finch would flit, the throstle would flicker, and the lark would keep popping into the clouds for incalculable absences. Here are æsthetic joys indeed!

Mark the devastating power of diversity and repetition: the throstle to thrill by his prosperous singularity; the maverick to soothe by his hypnotic recurrence.

And this normal multiplicity would render him, like the last rose of summer, excessively poignant alone. What sound, or what absence of sound, could be more whelming at the end of an autumnal stanza than —

Surely another bird ‘could not so mope.’

The fact of the matter is, that the word would be much more useful to me if I did not know its meaning. It would serve to eke out my meagre quota of nautical terms, thus: —

It would stead me as regalia in the Scottish Highlands: —

or thus: —

or, as a proper name, in this fashion: —

It would dig a ditch: —

But, best of all, it would carry conviction in one of those tremendously muscular feudal mêlées, not quite unknown to song and story, in which (to mount by polyphonic gradations to the theme) the true knight smites his blasphemous foe from helm to saddlebows a blow which, still unspent, unsandwiches his horse and rives the earth below: —

In my aviary, the finch and throstle forever mourn the deprivation of a comrade defrauded at christening. My autumnal sonnet stutters in the contemplation of a moan that never was. My sailor boy eschews the mizzenmast in an agony of baulked disposition. The impecunious Scot has no receptacle for his pittance, no cloak for his poverty. And the blasphemous Paynim blasphemes with perfect abandon in the absence of the blow that should rebuke him — from a weapon that shall be nameless. A dubious anonymity pervades my cosmos. For the word has gone forth that maverick shall mean a ‘small unbranded steer’ upon the Western prairie.

In the shadow of this disillusionment, one wonders again whether the ’mastery of a more precise idiom’ ever quite embitters the uses of profanity; whether all the words in Mr. Roosevelt’s religiously mortified (!) vocabulary ever burst among us with quite the lustre of one unpremeditated ‘ damn! ’