Note 275 — V

As ‘orthography’ itself means properly “right spelling”, it might be a curious question whether it is permissible to speak of an incorrect orthography, that is of a wrong right-spelling. The question which would be thus started is one of not unfrequent recurrence, and it is very worthy of observation how often, so soon as we take note of etymologies, this contradictio in adjecto is found to occur. I will here adduce a few examples from the Greek, the Latin, the German, and from our own tongue. Thus the Greeks having no convenient word to express a rider, apart from a rider on a horse, did not scruple to speak of the horseman (ἱππεύς) upon an elephant. They often allowed themselves in a like inaccuracy, where certainly there was no necessity; as in using ἀνδριάς of the statue of a woman; where it would have been quite as easy to have used εἱκών or ἄγαλμα. So too their ‘table’ (τράπεζα = τετράπεζα) involved probably the four feet which commonly support one; yet they did not shrink from speaking of a three-footed table (τρίπους τράπεζα), in other words, a “three-footed four-footed”; much as though we should speak of a “three-footed quadruped”. Homer writes of a ‘hecatomb’ not of a hundred, but of twelve, oxen; and elsewhere of Hebe he says, in words not reproducible in English, νέκταρ ἐωνοχόει. ‘Tetrarchs’ were often rulers of quite other than fourth parts of a land. Ἀκρατος had so come to stand for wine, without any thought more of its signifying originally the unmingled, that St. John speaks of ἄκρατος κεκερασμένος (Rev. xiv. 10), or the unmingled mingled. Boxes in which precious ointments were contained were so commonly of alabaster, that the name came to be applied to them whether they were so or not; and Theocritus celebrates “golden alabasters”. Cicero having to mention a water-clock is obliged to call it a water sundial (solarium ex aquâ). Columella speaks of a “vintage of honey” (vindemia mellis), and Horace invites his friend to impede, not his foot, but his head, with myrtle (caput impedire myrto). Thus too a German writer who desired to tell of the golden shoes with which the folly of Caligula adorned his horse could scarcely avoid speaking of golden hoof-irons. The same inner contradiction is involved in such language as our own, a “false verdict”, a “steel cuirass” (‘coriacea’ from corium, leather), “antics new” (Harrington’s Ariosto), an “erroneous etymology”, a “corn chandler”; that is, a “corn candle-maker”, “rather late”, ‘rather’ being the comparative of ‘rathe’, early, and thus “rather late” being indeed “more early late”; and in others.