The life and growth of language : an outline of linguistic science / By William Dwight Whitney.

  • William Dwight Whitney
Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The life and growth of language : an outline of linguistic science / By William Dwight Whitney. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    a crescent-shaped outwork: an analogy, this time, of shape merely. Nor is it meant to imply that the moon is always, or usually, of this shape; but only that she is the most conspicuous object in nature that ever as- sumes the shape. If we want to be more precise, we say crescent-shaped. But here also is an ellipsis, and of the most striking kind; for crescent literally means simply ' growing,' and does not contain even a hint of the moon. Moreover, the moon does not have this shape all the time she is growing, but only at a par- ticular period, and she has it just as much when decreas- ing as when increasing; so that crescent really means ' [resembling the moon at a certain stage of her] grow- ing [as also of her waning].' It is good English, too, to talk of a moon-struck idler as mooning around, al- though we should indignantly deny the belief in lunar influences which suggested the expressions. This may seem like an aimless roaming through one department of our vocabulary; but its heterogeneous- ness is due to the character of the facts with which we have to deal, and is an important part of the value of the illustration. It is simply impossible to exhaust the variety of significant change in linguistic growth: there is no conceivable direction in which a transfer may not be made; there is no assignable distance to which a word may not wander from its primitive meaning. There is no such thing as a concise and exhaustive clas- sification of such variety; all we can do is to point out some of the main divisions, the leading directions in which the movement goes on, neglecting the unclassi- fied and perhaps in part unclassifiable residue. One of the largest classes (already more than once hinted at) has a striking example in crescent. Crescent, i growing,' is a word of the widest application; a young
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