this group{163}.

{Sidenote: _Words become Vulgar_}

Perhaps one of the most frequent causes which leads to the disuse of
words is this: in some inexplicable way there comes to be attached
something of ludicrous, or coarse, or vulgar to them, out of a feeling
of which they are no longer used in earnest serious writing, and at the
same time fall out of the discourse of those who desire to speak
elegantly. Not indeed that this degradation which overtakes words is in
all cases inexplicable. The unheroic character of most men's minds, with
their consequent intolerance of that heroic which they cannot
understand, is constantly at work, too often with success, in taking
down words of nobleness from their high pitch; and, as the most
effectual way of doing this, in casting an air of mock-heroic about
them. Thus 'to dub', a word resting on one of the noblest usages of
chivalry, has now something of ludicrous about it; so too has 'doughty';
they belong to that serio-comic, mock-heroic diction, the multiplication
of which, as of all parodies on greatness, and the favour with which it
is received, is always a sign of evil augury for a nation, is at present
a sign of evil augury for our own.

'Pate' in the sense of head is now comic or ignoble; it was not so once;
as is plain from its occurrence in the Prayer Book Version of the Psalms
(Ps. vii. 17); as little was 'noddle', which occurs in one of the few
poetical passages in Hawes. The same may be said of 'sconce', in this
sense at least; of 'nowl' or 'noll', which Wiclif uses; of 'slops' for
trousers (Marlowe's _Lucan_); of 'cocksure' (Rogers), of 'smug', which
once meant no more than adorned ("the _smug_ bridegroom", Shakespeare).
'To nap' is now a word without dignity; while yet in Wiclif's Bible it
is said, "Lo he schall not _nappe_, nether slepe that kepeth Israel"
(Ps. cxxi. 4). 'To punch', 'to thump', both of which, and in serious
writing, occur in Spenser, could not now obtain the same use, nor yet
'to wag', or 'to buss'. Neither would any one now say that at Lystra
Barnabas and Paul "rent their clothes and _skipped out_ among the
people" (Acts xiv. 14), which is the language that Wiclif employs; nor
yet that "the Lord _trounced_ Sisera and all his host" as it stands in
the Bible of 1551. "A _sight_ of angels", for which phrase see Cranmer's
Bible (Heb. xii. 22), would be felt as a vulgarism now. We should
scarcely call now a delusion of Satan a "_flam_ of the devil" (H