£5 Misspent

Any one who is interested in what nobody has yet asked us to call the British language must have felt apprehensive if he read the correspondence recently printed in the Times on the subject of a synonym for the word “Colonial.” It appears that this word is “strongly objected to” in the—er—Dominions, and especially in Canada. The Central Committee of the Overseas Club therefore started a Missing Word Competition. It offered a prize of £5 for the best synonym and “members have been most prolific in their ideas.” The examples given of their fecundity are, however, so malformed as to lead to the hope that in future they will practise an intellectual Malthusianism. The Chairman of the Club says that amongst the terms suggested are Britainer, Britonial, Imperialist, Dominion, Britannian, Britoner, Greater Briton, Anglian Pan-Briton, and such repulsive composts as Empirean, Transmarine (why not Ultramarine?), Away-Born, Out-Briton, Co-Briton, Albionian, MacBriton, and Britson. What those which he does not publish were like one can only surmise; but no doubt Ap-Briton, O’Briton, Britidian, Britkinson, Dominisher, Fraternanglian, Nonsunsetton, and Heptathalassian were among them. And so, possibly, was Oversear.

It needs must be that new words should come; and one should not cry woe against those through whom they come. We are constantly inventing or importing words to convey ideas or shades of feeling for which we previously had no exact means of expression. We also necessarily acquire new words for new objects, such as chemicals and machines. When men made the telephone they had to call it something; and the same thing applied to the omnibus. We can frequently trace new words to their inventors. But we may safely say that successful new words are seldom “made up” cold-bloodedly merely for the sake of the thing. An author hits upon a word half-accidentally, developing it usually from some word already familiar; or a philosopher or scientist constructs one out of fragments of Greek, or Latin, or Greek and Latin mixed, because he has a new object to describe. The process is going on continually. The rivals “airman” and “aviator” (somebody once asked if you could call a miner a “talpiator”) are at present⁠[2] fighting it out in the Press and on men’s tongues; and if some central authority is in the future established over the heads of the sovereign Powers, it is likely that the word “supernational,” now being bruited about, may come into use to describe it. We may get in time, too, an inclusive word which will imply “citizen of the British Empire,” covering both Britons (or, if you prefer it, Britirish) and Colonials. But I doubt whether such a word will result from a public competition.

When it comes it will come because some one person starts using it and others take to it. And when it is a case of inventing a synonym, a new word as a substitute for an old one in general use, I think it most unlikely that a group of persons such as the Overseas Club could persuade the race to abandon a universally used word like “Colonial” for some £5 prize word merely because hypersensitive people think that the word used to have a faintly derogatory flavour. “Colonial” is very strongly entrenched. One can just understand how the Americans have come to use the abominable word “Britisher” instead of the ancient “Briton”; for it falls more trippingly off the tongue. But “Colonial” is a most liquid, easy, and euphonious word. If it is ever superseded, it will be so because some other word comes in with the larger connotation to which I have referred, a word which is bound to come into being when we cease to think of the Empire as composed of the United Kingdom on the one hand and the Colonies on the other, but think of it as a federation of equal and distinct units.

It is a pity that people take so seriously the fact that when the words “Colonies” and “Colonial” were first used by us they had certain associations. For it is evident that to the vast majority of our countrymen they are entirely divested of them. Whatever one’s habits, one automatically thinks when the word “Colonial” is mentioned, not of a humble emigrant who wants shepherding, but of a person who is the very quintessence of independence. Any one who has even the most superficial acquaintance with the language knows that words can lose their old associations utterly. If, for example, I were arrested and charged for alleging, in a public speech, one of our Royal Princes to be “a silly knave,” I should not find the magistrate very sympathetic if I said I was using the words in a Shakespearean (which in this case would be equivalent to a Pickwickian) sense, and that I merely meant to call him “a simple boy.” Similarly, where an object changes its form its name changes its connotation. If one could talk of a bottle to a mediæval ancestor, he would think of something made of leather; to-day a bottle is essentially something made of glass. If we always wanted a new term directly a new association was created, there would be no end to the process; we should have to have a Ministry of Constructive Philology always at work. After all, Charleston was named after an English king when the North American plantations were very subordinate indeed; and Melbourne after a member of the British House of Lords, an institution of which few modern Australians approve. So, on the whole, saving the Overseas Club’s reverence, we may as well, for the time being, stick to “Colonial.”

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