ich enthused
their zeal and their play, broke through the limitations of beast
language, and went on to use the sounds of the human speech instrument
for ever richer communications. Poetic power in blossom guides the
development of a child's language as it guided that of the men who made
the first languages.[237] "The original languages must be, in
comparison with our languages, like the wildest love-passion compared
with marital custom."[238] Every word has a history of accidents which
have befallen it, the beginnings of which are lost in the abyss of
time.[239] In the Middle Ages the word "Word" came to mean the Word of
God with such distinctness that the romance languages adopted parabola,
or derivatives from it, for "word."[240] The students of linguistics
recognize metaphor as another great mode of modifying the signification
of words. By metaphor they mean the assembling of like things, and the
selection and extirpation of unlike things.

+136. Language and magic.+ Preuss offers an explanation of the origin of
language which is interesting on account of its connection with the vast
operation of magic: "Language owes its origin to the magic of tones and
words. The difficulty of winning any notion about the beginnings of
human speech lies in the fact that we cannot think of any cause which
should give occasion for speech utterances. Such occasions are products
of education, after language already existed. They are effects of
language, not causes of it.... Language belongs, like play, dances, and
fine arts, to the things which do not come on a direct line of
development out of the instinctive satisfaction of life-needs and the
other activities which create things of positive value, but it is the
result of belief in magic, which prompted men to imitate noises made in
labor, and other natural sounds, through a wide range, in order thereby
to produce operations."[241]

+137. Language is a case of mores.+ Whitney said that language is an
institution. He meant that it is in the folkways, or in the mores, since
welfare is connected with the folkways of language, albeit by some
superstition. He adds: "In whatever aspect the general facts of language
are viewed, they exhibit the same absence of reflection and
intention."[242] "No one ever set himself deliberately at work to invent
or improve language,--or did so, at least, with any valuable and abiding
result. The work is all accomplished by a continual satisfaction of the