104 The Penguin Guide to Plain English

meaning. That is what happened w ith ‘darling’ and ‘favourite’. And this drifting apart often produced subtle differentiations of meaning. Even

where the meanings remained for dictionary purposes identical, the

duplication allowed of subtle distinctions resonating in the overtones of

the words. ‘Sorrow’ is an Anglo-Saxon word, ‘misery’ a Latin word. They

have drifted apart in their emotive baggage. ‘Hearty’ and ‘cordial’ give

us synonyms which strike the ear w ith very different resonance. ‘We

greeted him heartily’ rings different mental bells from ‘We saluted him

cordially.’ No one would suggest that there is much difference in meaning

between the verb ‘begin’ and the w ord ‘commence’. Even so we use the

two words in different contexts.

It is risky to generalize about this drifting apart of native and parallel

Latin words. Where, say, the word ‘grasp’ is a forceful word in its concrete sense (‘He grasped the pole and hurled it in the air’) and the

parallel Latin words ‘com prehend’ and ‘apprehend’ are likely to be

associated with getting hold of things w ith the m ind rather than with

the body, nevertheless we readily speak of ‘grasping’ new ideas and we

used to refer regularly to the business of ‘apprehending’ criminals. Usage

does not stand still in this respect. We now use the word ‘heavy’ chiefly

in reference to physical weight. We use the w ord ‘weighty’ of both

physical items and arguments. The Latin equivalent, ‘ponderous’, tends

to be used only in a metaphorical sense of over-solemn personages. Yet

I have just read a notice issued by the Midland Railway in 187^:

This bridge is insufficient to carry weights beyond the ordinary traffic of

the district, and the owners and persons in charge of Locomotive Traction

Engines and other ponderous carriages are warned against passing over the

bridge.

A century or so later that use of the adjective ‘ponderous’ can only be

said to seem too ponderous.

Otto Jesperson pointed out that our native vocabulary seems to have

been short o f adjectives, w ith the result that we tend to shift from native

nouns to foreign adjectives. He cites the noun ‘m outh’ and the adjective

‘oral’, the noun ‘nose’ and the adjective ‘nasal’, the noun ‘eye’ and the

adjective ‘ocular’, the noun ‘son’ and the adjective ‘filial’. The adjectives

here have no native equivalents, unless we count the adjective ‘nosey’

(and what a homely, unsophisticated word that is). In cases where there

has been recourse to foreign adjectives despite the existence of parallel

native ones, the two words tend to drift apart in meaning. Thus ‘timely’