ross 1964 scientist the story of a word

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Scientist: The story of a wordSydney Rossa

a Rensselaer Povtechnic Institute, Troy, New York

To cite this Article Ross, Sydney(1962) 'Scientist: The story of a word', Annals of Science, 18: 2, 65 — 85To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00033796200202722URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00033796200202722

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ANNALS OF SCIENCE A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SINCE THE RENAISSANCE

VOL. 18 June, 1962 No. 2

(Published April, 1964)

S C I E N T I S T : THE STORY OF A WORD

By SYDNEY ROSS, B.Sc., Ph.D. *

[PLATES III-V]

This is a question of words and names. I know the strife it brings.

Kipling, Gallio' s Song

TH~ appellation scientist is considered a title of honour, hotly contended for by economists, engineers, physicians, psychologists, and others. The word itself is widely believed to have been classical for centuries ; yet it is actually of recent origin and had a hard fight to establish itself against a number of competitors. The argument, which is now an old and forgotten controversy, was chiefly about its etymology ; but the history of a word is never solely a matter of etymology : the need for a new word is socially determined, right at the start, and auy subsequent changes of denotation, as well as the cluster of connotations surrounding it, are also in response to demands from society. The word cannot be isolated from its historical background; indeed some key words offer a concise and suggestive clue to the historian or sociologist.

The present account of the history of the word scientist is not simply an excursion into philology, though philology necessarily has a prominent part in the story. When an appellation is accepted or rejected as the designation of a group of people, ostensible reasons for and against may be based on philology, but the motives, which are not usually admitted consciously, are dictated by quite another consideration, namely, the image that the word provokes. To the historian of science the present story is significant because it marks in a dramatic way the transition of the cultivation of science from the hands of the amateur to those of the professional. The designation scientist, with its overtones of specialism

* Professor of Colloid Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.

Ann. of Sci.--.-Vol, 18: No. 2. F.

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66 Sydney Ross on

and professionalism (cf. dentist, pediatrist, etc.) was not in accord with the persona that the gifted amateur had of himself and his scientific pursuits ; his ideal was that of a man liberally educated, whose avocation was science as an intellectual cum philanthropic recreation, to which he might indeed devote most of his time without ever surrendering his claim to be a private gentleman of wide culture. In particular, to be thought of as pursuing science for money was distasteful. Even men like Davy and Faraday, who actually earned their livelihoods by the practice of science, were so imbued by this atti tude as to reject opportunities of enriching themselves by patenting or otherwise restricting the publication of their inventions. The genuine amateurs and the actual professionals, who still maintained the same ideals as the amateurs, chose science for its own sake and regarded themselves as benefactors of mankind ; they scorned

To heap the shrine of luxury and pride With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

They did in fact use similar lofty expressions in describing their ideals. To them the word scientist implied making a business of science ; it degraded their labours of love to a drudgery for profits or salary.

The old ideals died hard, but they could not survive the educational reforms that placed technical education on the same footing as education for the learned professions of medicine, law, and theology. To the student preparing for a career, science was now presented merely as another alternative profession ; and the word scientist carried no less desirable connotations than did physician, lawyer, or clergyman.

I. Evolution of Science

By way of introduction to our story of scientist we should glance at the words science and scientific. Science entered the English language in the Middle Ages as a French importation synonymous with knowledge. I t sool~ gained the connotation of accurate and systematized knowledge, by a semantic infection fl'om the technical meaning that the earliest Latin translators of Aristotle had conferred on the adjective scientificus. This latter word was understood by the Schoolmen in terms of the Aristotelian theory of knowledge. One had ' scientific knowledge' when h ~. had arrived at it demonstratively, tha t is, by a syllogism that started from necessary first principles grasped by pure reason or intuition (vog~). In the temporal order of acquisition these principles are attained by induction from experience; the demonstrative syllogism that follows is then an exercise of deductive logic. Demonstration is not to be understood as we might today, i.e., by experiment, but, in the same sense as the quod err~t demonstrandum of Euclid.


Scientist : The Story of a Word 67

The adjective scientific means ' pertaining to science, ' but its etymo- logical meaning is ' productive of science. ' This peculiarity has been traced (see the O.E.D. under scientific) to a phrase in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, I, ii (71b), where it is said that when certain conditions are met a syllogism will be demonstrative ' for it will produce knowledge ' ; such a syllogism was called by the translator (supposed to be Boethius, 6th century) ' syllogismum epistemonicon, id est facientem scire ' ; and later in the text, remembering the phrase, he translated a~ ~marV/~ow~a~ &rroSd~e~ by ' scientificae demonstrationes.' This looks as if the Greek adjective dmar~//zowKd~ (pertaining to knowledge ; reed. Latin scientialis) when it refers to demonstrable knowledge should be translated by scientificus. Subsequent commentators of Aristotle, and translators of other works by the same author, were perhaps glad to receive a term that pointed out the Aristotelian distinction between demonstrable knowledge and intuitive knowledge, and for this benefit chose to disregard the literal interpretation of their text, which they should have rendered by scientialis, in favour of the freer but more significant rendering, scientificus, which thus in a single word conveyed Aristotle's idea of the type of certain knowledge arising from demonstrable proof. Or perhaps they did not think of any of this but slavishly reiterated Boethius's term without being aware that it would be inappropriate in other contexts. At all events, by being used consistently with the same meaning, scientificus, regardless of its etymology, became a technical term of the Schoolmen, meaning 'pertaining to demonstrable knowledge, or science.' The word entered the Romance languages (It. scientifico ; Fr. scientifique) with this meaning, but came into English only as late as 1600.

The linguistically curious phrase scientific knowledge was not a tautology: its purpose was to create a distinction between common knowledge and scientific knowledge. From now on, science and knowledge were not to be considered as synonymous : science stood for a particular kind of knowledge--firmer and less fallible knowledge-- whether that knowledge is to be derived, as Aristotle had taught, by straight deductive logic, with the geometry of Euclid as a model ; or whether, as Bacon was the first to apprehend, it must gradually evolve, using observation and experiment, by refining and clarifying its former partial truths. I f we date the inauguration of the latter insight as 1620, with the publication of the Novum Organum, we can appropriately date its full realization as 1830, the year in which Herschel published his Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. This book enthusiastically endorsed the Baconian rejection of scholasticism, basing its case on the achievements of the new method ; achievements of which Bacon had been granted only a Pisgah sight. From ]620 to 1830, then, we find a shifting of the philosophical point of view about the source of scientific

~ 2


68 Sydney Ross on

knowledge, which is reflected by a corresponding change in the significance accorded to the word science.

The sciences, as unders tood by the Scholastic philosophers in the Aristotel ian sense, were specialized branches of philosophy, and included the seven sciences of mediaeval l ea rn ing : grammar , logic, rhetoric, ar i thmet ic , music, geometry , and as t ronomy. When the number of sciences was enlarged, they were classified under the headings of natural , moral, and first phi losophy (or metaphysics) . Bu t we actual ly find Grosseteste, the 13th-century advocate of exper imenta l science, mainta in- ing tha t ' d e m o n s t r a t i v e ' knowledge was not possible in the natura l sciences and therefore seeking to deny them the t i t le of sciences : ' na tura l phi losophy offers its explanat ions probably ra ther t h a n scientifically . . . . Only in mathemat ics is there science and demonstra t ion. ,1

This heri tage of Aristotel ian thought was also in Locke 's mind when he wrote : ' I am apt to doubt , t ha t so far however human indus t ry ma y advance useful and exper imenta l phi losophy in physical things, scientifical will still be out of our reach ; because we want perfect and adequate Ideas of those very bodies which are nearest to us and most under our com- mand. ' 2 And again, ' This way of gett ing and improving our knowledge in substances only by experience and history, which is all t ha t the weak- ness of our faculties in this s tate of mediocri ty, which we are in this world, can a t ta in to, makes me suspect t h a t na tura l phi losophy is not capable of being made a science. ,a A recent writer, comment ing on the last clause of this sentence, expressed surprise tha t Locke was ' so sceptical about the possibilities of physics, only a few years af ter the publicat ion of Newton 's Principia. ,4 Bu t Locke was far f rom feeling any such scepticism ; the misunders tanding arises by reading the modern significance of science into Locke 's use of the word. Newton himself, it will be remembered, had cast the Principia into the form of Euclid 's Geometry in a taci t effort to elevate na tura l phi losophy to the rank of a ' science ' E v e n as late as the n ine teenth century we find Hegel denying to physics the ti t le of science ; the physicists merely shrugged ; what would have dis turbed Newton, amused Helmholtz .

Such rigorous definitions and nice refinements hardly affect common speech. Science re ta ined as one of its meanings any knowledge acquired b y s tudy, or any skill acquired by practice. J ane Austen used it in t h a t way :

' Every savage can dance, ' [said Mr Darcy.] Sir William only s m i l e d . . . ' I doubt not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr Darcy. '

1 Grosseteste 's commenta ry on the Posterior Analytics, I, xi ; quoted f rom A. C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, roy. second edn., Now York. 1959, vol. ii., p.16.

2 John Locke, Essay on human understanding, Bk. IV, Chap. 3, Sect. 26. a Idem,, ibid., Bk. IV, Chap. 12, Sect. 10 4 A. E. Boll, Newtonian, science, London, 1961, p. 136.



But another meaning was also current in the language of 18th- and early 19th-century England. The elaim made by Newton and rejected by Locke was now conceded : any kind of knowledge acquired by observation or experiment was freely called seientific and admitted to the company of the older sciences, which had not yet lost their claim to that title. The precise classifications of the philosophies and their constituent Sciences were the technical jargon of the Universities; outside the elassrooms a related, though looser, usage held--the terms philosophy and science were interchangeable in certain connexions : e.g., experimental science or experimental philosophy ; and moral science or morM philosophy. A book published in 1821 illustrates that one word had become merely an elegant variation for the other : ' Elements of the Philosophy of Plants : containing the Scientific Principles of Botany ; Nomenclature, Theory of Classification, Phytography, Anatomy, Chem- istry, Physiology, Eeography, and Diseases of Plants : with a History of the Science, and Practical illustrations (By A. P. Decandolle and K. Sprengell) '. The period of synonymity lasted about fifty years, approxi- mately 1800-1850; increasingly during that time the consensus of opinion, perhaps influenced by the example of French usage, favoured the allocation of philosophy to the theological and mctaphysicM, and science to the experimental and physical branches of knowledge. We see the latter word brought into prominence with its modern meaning in the creation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831). Two volumes in my possession aptly illustrate the change: they are both collections of preprints or reprints on various topics of physics ; the first, bound M)out 1825, is lettered Philosophical Tracts ; the other, bound in the eighteen-sixties, is. lettered Scientific Memoirs.

The growth of the linguistic distinction had its origin in the difference between the methods of physical science and of metaphysical philosophy. Each of them cannot be called both science and philosophy for long without confusion ; if ' natm'al philosophy ' is to be cMled ' physical science ', then ' moral science ' must perforce become ' moral philosophy '. At the same time a strong predisposition existed in favour of science because of the tangible benefits derived from it, compared to the barrenness of philosophy, so that the exchange of names was probably felt to be also a re-arrangement of relative ranks in the hierarchy of knowledge. Carlyle, writing anonymously for the Edinburgh Review in 1829, pointed out a trend in a tone that is familiar to our own days of 1964 : ~

It is admitted, on all sides, that the Metaphysical and Moral Sciences are falling into decay, while the Physical are engrossing, every day, more respect and attention . . . . This condition of the two great depart- ments of knowledge ; the outer, cultivated exclusively on mechanical

5 IT. Carlyle], Edinbwrgh Review, 1829, 49, 444-7.


70 S y d n e y Ross o n

principles-- the inward finally abandoned, because, cult ivated on such principles, it is found to yield no result--sufficiently indicates the intel- leetuM bias of our time, its all-pervading disposition towards tha t line of enquiry. I n fact, an inward persuasion has long been diffusing itself, and now and then even comes to utterance, tha t except the external, there are no true sciences ; t ha t to the inward world (if there be any) our only conceivable road is through the o u t w a r d ; that , in short, what cannot be investigated and understood mechanically, cannot be investigated and understood at all.

Carlyle h a d indeed co r rec t ly i n t e r p c t e d the signs o f the t imes. As a smal l ind ica to r o f the t rend , the w o r d sc ience in c o m m o n speech came to h a v e t he d o m i n a n t m e a n i n g of ' n a t u r a l and phys ica l science, ' while o the r app l ica t ions sank in to disuse.

T h e g rowing pres t ige o f phys ica l science in the 19th c e n t u r y expla ins w h y it cou ld t h u s a r roga t e t o i tself t he w o r d p rev ious ly used for all knowledge . The usage, once establ ished, gave l inguist ic s u p p o r t to t he e tude belief, a d v e r t e d to b y Carlyle, t h a t t he on ly t rue knowledge is t h a t o f t he ma te r i a l wor ld as exp lo red b y phys ica l science ; t he eu l turM impl ica t ions o f this op in ion h a v e ramif ied t h r o u g h o u t r ecen t h i s to ry , pol i t ical as well as in te l lectual , a n d h a v e m a d e no small c o n t r i b u t i o n to our c o n t e m p o r a r y disquie t . Our g r ea t -g r and fa the r s , who m i g h t have p r o t e c t e d us aga ins t t he unjus t i f iab le ve rba l u su rpa t ion , were s ingula r ly compla i san t . R u s k i n a lone seems to h a v e scen ted d a n g e r a n d g rowled a warn ing , in 1875, too la te to a r res t t he t r e n d :~

I t has become the permit ted fashion among modern mathematicians, chemists, and apothecaries, to call themselves 'scientific men, ' as opposed to theologians, poets, and artists. They know their sphere to be a separate one ; but their ridiculous notion of its being a peculiarly scientific one ought not to be allowed in our Universities. 7 There is a science of Morals, a science of I t is tory, a science of Grammar, a science of Music, and a science of Painting ; and all these are quite beyond comparison higher fields for human intellect, and require accuracies of intenser observation, than either chemistry, electricity, or geology.

J. Ruskin, Ariadne florentina, 1874, in Works, ed. Cook and Wedderburn, London, 1906, vol. xxii., p. 396 n.

As an undergraduate of Oxford in tile 1830s Ruskin was familiar with a peculiarly Oxonian use of the word science, which was currently applied to the study of Aristotle's Ethics, Butler's Analogy of religion, etc. (i.e. morM philosophy), logic, and cognate studies, included in the course of study for a degree in the school of Literae Humaniores. Here we find science used in strict accord with Grosseteste's interpretation of Aristotle ; the usage was therefore a relict of the 13th century ; it was maintained until ca. 1850. (Is this a record for academic conservatism ?) Ruskin, returning to Oxford as a professor in 1870, stoutly opposed all encroachments by modern science, and resigned his chair in 1884 as an expression of his disapproval when a laboratory for physiology was established by the University.



Again, in 1878, writing of modes of investigation ' v u l g a r l y called scientific,' he added : s

The use of the word scientia, as if it differed from knowledge, [is] a modern barbarism; enhanced usually by the assumption that the knowledge of the difference between acids and alkalies is a more respect- able one than that of the difference between vice and virtue.

I I . In t roduc t ion of Scientist

With the new meaning of science the need to designate a man of science became more pressing. Hi ther to philosopher had served, but, as I have said, philosophy had narrowed in meaning to exclude na tura l philosophy, except in the minds and mouths of an older generation. An English man of science who called himself a philosopher now did so ra ther self-consciously, or hastened to qualify the name with the adjectives ' experimental ' or ' natural . ' The French word philosophe was immedi- ately brought to mind, and those designated by tha t word were no t men of science, besides having been notorious atheists. The name scientist was first p ropounded in the Quarterly Review for March, 1834. The anonymous reviewer made the suggestion, too jocularly, however, to be t aken entirely in earnest, in the course of a review of Mrs Somerville's book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. From Todhunter ' s b iography 9 we learn tha t the reviewer was William Whewell, F.R.S. Whewell wrote : 10

The tendency of the sciences has long been an increasing proclivity of separation and dismemberment . . . . The mathematician turns away from the chemist ; the chemist from the naturalist ; the mathematician, left to himself, divides himself into a pure mathematician and a mixed mathematician, who soon part company ; the chemist is perhaps a chemist of electro-chemistry; if so, he leaves common eh(;mica! analysis to others; between the mathematician and the chemist i~ to be interpolated a 'physicien' (we have no English name for him), who studies heat, moisture, and the like. And thus science, even mere physical science, loses all traces of unity. A curious illustration of thb~ result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collec- tively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings at York, Oxford, and Cambridge, in the last three summers. There was no general term by which these gentlemen

s j . Ruskin, The Nineteenth Century, 1878, 4, 1072 n. Reprinbed in Works, ed. Cook and

Wedderburn, London, 1908, vol. xxxiv., p. 157 n. 9 I. Todhunter , William Whewell, an account of his writings, with selections from his

llterary and scientific correspondence, London, 1876, vol. i . ,p. 92. The editor of the Quart.erly Review, J . G. Loekhart , had prescribed ' a lightish paper ' for the review of Mrs Somerville's book, and he commended Whewell for his ' spirited ' contribution.

10 [W. Whewell], The Quarterly Review, 1834, 51, 58-61.


72 Sydney i~oss on

could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits. Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician ; sarans was rather assuming, besides being French instead of English ; some ingenious gentleman [Whewell himself] proposed that, by auMogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist--but this was not generally palatable ; others attempted to translate the term by which the members of similar associations in Germany have described themselves, but it was not found easy to discover an English equivalent for natur-forscher. The process of examination which it implies might suggest such undig- nified compounds as nature-poker, * or nature-peeper, for these naturae curiosi ; but these were indignantly rejected.

Proposed in this way, especially with the detract ive association of sciolist and atheist th rown in for a humorous effect, the suggestion was obviously frivolous and could not have been considered seriously tbr a moment . Six years later, in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Whewell made the suggestion again, this t ime more soberly, in the following passage : 1~

The terminations ize (rather than ise), ism, and ist, are applied to words of all origins : thus we have to pulverize, to colonize, Witticism, Heathenism, Journalist, Tobacconist. Hence we may make such words when they are wanted. As we cannot use physician for a cultivator of physics, I have called him a Physicist. We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist.

Comments were not slow in coming. F a r a d a y wrote :12

1 perceive Mso another new and good word, tile sc'tent'est. Now can you give us one for the French physicien? Physicist is both to my mouth and ears so awkward that I think I shall never be able to use it. The equivalent of three separate sounds of i in one word is too much.

H a d Fa raday forgot ten criticism ? As for hailing scientist as ' g o o d , ' t ha t was mere pol i teness: F a r a d a y never used the word, describing himself as an experimental philosopher to the end of his career. Lord Kelvin, when his a t tent ion was drawn to physicist some fifty years later,

* When the German association met at JJcrlin, a caricature was circulated there, repre- senting the ' collective wisdom ' employed in the discussion of their mid-day meal wil~h ext raord inary zeal of mastication, and dexteri ty in l~he use of the requisite implements, to which was affixed the legend-- ' Wie die natur-forscher natur-forsehen, ' which we venture to translate ' the poking of the nature-pokers ' [Whewell's note].

~1 W. Whewell, The philosophy of the inductive sciences, London, 1840, vol. i., p. cxiii. 12 Notes and records of the Royal Society, 1961, 16. 216.



also disapproved. He preferred naturalist, which he found defined in Johnson ' s Dictionary ( 17 5 5) as 'a person well versed in na tura l philosophy. '

Armed with this authority, chemists, electricians, astronomers, and mathematicians may surely claim to be admitted along with mere descriptive investigators of nature to the honourable and conwmient title of Naturalist, and refuse to accept so un-English, unpleasing, and meaningless a variation from old usage as physicist. ~

I t was, of course, too late by 1890 to tu rn the clock back to tha t extent . But con temporary comment had been equally devastat ing : Blackwood's Magazine ~ had this to say : ' T h e word physicists, where four sibilant consonants fizz like a squib . . . . '

At first bo th of Whewell 's new words were slow to be adopted. For a t ime savant came near to being natural ized : the review periodicals got as far as print ing it wi thout the italic type tha t former ly set it off as a foreign word. ~ Bu t physicist and scientist were too much in accord with the needs of the times to be neglected indefinitely. The la t ter word appears indeed to have been coined independent ly by other writers : i t appeared in Blackwood's Magazine ~6 in 1840, probably independent ly of Whewel t ; in 1849, the American as t ronomer Benjamin A. Gould proposed it, unaware tha t he was not its first introducer ; and in 1853, F i tzedward Hall, the American philologist, thinking it a fancy of his own, made use of it in a short- l ived Indian periodical, Ledlie's Miscellany, vol. 2, p. 169.17 In America scientist was immediate ly at home ; the Americans were not t roubled, even had they been generally aware of it, t ha t their seemingly innocent import was the outcome of a heinous linguistic improprie ty .

Whewell had never been one to enter ta in fine-drawn scruples about so-called philological anomMies : convenience in use had more weight with him than the anMogies of language, especially as there could be no pleasing a grammar ian with any neologism: to a grammarian 's ear, all such extensions of the language, no ma t t e r how conformable to analogy, could not seem otherwise t h a n as solecisms. Whewell held tha t a l though anomalies, such as hybr id words or incorrect formations,

1~ Sir W. Thomson, Mathematical a~d physical pal~crn, London, 1890, vol. ii., p. 318. ~4 Blachwood'8 Magazine, 1843, 54, 524. t~ In French the distinction between le philosophe and le sgavant had already been

established in its modern sense quite early in the 18th century. In the post-Darwin period, 1860-1900, le scientiste appeared, to designate a believer in the philosophy of scicntific materiMism, e.g., Littr6 and Berthelot.

~ Blackwood's Magazine, 1840, 48, 273. 17 The O.E.D. given this reference incorrectly as Leslie's Miscellany. The word appeared

in an unsigned article by Hall, in the course of which he spoke sharply of British travellers who published criticisms of the St, a,tes on their re turn. One category of these visitors was described by the phrase ¢ atrabilious scientist, s ' ; Hall probably had Sir Charles Lyell in mind as the archetype of this class.


74 Sydney Ross on

should be avoided as much as possible, they are to be admitted whenever manifestly advantageous terms, easy to acquire and convenient to use, are unattainable without them. For the scientific study of tidal phenomena, for example, he hesitated not to offer the hybrid tidology, is He had coined scientist with the same non-doctrinaire and masculine attitude, well aware that philologically it is of dubious legitimacy. The suffix -ist is derived originally from Greek words, through their latinized versions. No Greek word corresponds to the Latin scientia, and the ancient Romans would not have endured 8cientistes or scientista, as a new type of hybrid : in order to acclimatize it they would have required, normally, the pre- existence of a Greek verb ending in--l~e~v or - - l~aO~, such as fi~Tr'rt~v, ao¢l~tv, &~o~vl~eaOo~, ~o?l~EaO~t. The agent-nouns formed from these verbs consist of the agential suffix-r~ added to the verb stem, as in fl~zrTta--r~, dipper; aoCta-T~, clever man, sophist; &~wvt~-~, combatant, competitor; hoT~a-r~,, calculator. English words derived therefrom include baptist, sophist, antagonist, and philologist, is The word scientist is, therefore, a Latin-Greek hybrid or, at best, a formation from incorrect Latin.

Had Whewell been timid, he would have selected an alternative free from this objection, or perhaps a form for which he could find some ancient precedent: sciencer, sciencist, scientiate, scient, scientman, and scientific (sb. analogous to academic, classic) had all, at one time or another, been used previously. But they had not served. The form of any word in -ist can be discriminated from its form in -or by the profes- sionM or systematic sense tha t is implied by the more learned ending : compare philologist and philologer, copyist and copier, cyclist and cycler : hence scientist is more suitable than sciencer, and indeed, because of this implication, more suitable than any other word that lacks it. Another

i s , :Not even his high au thor i ty can reconcile ine to the barbarous compound tidology. ' I . Todhunte r in ref. 9, voL 1, p. 86. Some other of Whewell 's words incurred the scorn of a more formidable c r i t ie - -H. W. Fowler. Al though Lyell is blamed in the following passage, Whewell was the original offender (see ref. 20) :

Pleistocene, pliocene, miocene, are regrettable BARBARISMS. I t is wor th while to ment ion this, no t because the words themselves can now be either mended or ended, bu t on the chance t ha t the men of science m a y some day wake up to their duties to the l anguage- -du t ies much less simple t han they are apt to suppose.

Tha t barbar i sms should exist is a p i ty ; to expend much energy on denouncing these tha t do exist is a waste ; to create t hem is a grave misdemeanour ; and the greater the need of the word tha t is made, the greater its maker ' s guilt if he miscreates it. A man of science might be expected to do on his great occasion wha t the ordinary m a n cannot do every day, ask the philologist 's he lp ; tha t the famous eocene- plelstoeene names were made by ' a good classical schola r ' (see Lyell in D.N.B.) shows tha t word-format ion is a ma t t e r for the specialist. H . W . Fowler, A dictionary of modern Engl ish usage, Oxford, 1926.

19 O.E.D. under -/at, and ref. 24 , p. 28.



possibility in ist, sciencist, is ugly because of sibilance. Whewhell's flair for the appropriate word is evident here, as in other words of his coinage ;,0 his attempts to ' bid the new be English, ages hence, ' were successful precisely for the reason given by Pope in the next line of the couplet : ' For Use will father what's begot by Sense. ' Those undefinable qualities, the genius of the language and the climate of opinion, determine what is meet and proper and reject all else, despite the scholars. In this case, the scholars and their journalistic echoers had much to say.

III . Objections to Scientist

The argument that followed about scientist came too late to affect the shift in usage by which all knowledge save that of the material world had been excluded from science ; that change had been accomplished a generation or two earlier, had been almost universally accepted and was no longer open to debate. But by establishing scientist as a specific designation, the new position of science would be buttressed and immeasur- ably strengthened. Was there no champion to repudiate this exclusive title held by a small group of professional men, the knowledge of other men being deemed no better than nescience or ignorance ? There were, significantly enough, no opponents to scientist who objected to it on that score. They seized on the irregularity of its construction: 'scients or savants but, please, Mr Cocks, not scientists.' 21 They also played, for all it was worth, their conviction (alas! a false one) that it had a trans-Atlantic origin. Those who objected to scientist wished to uphold the worth and dignity of the study of science. By inescapable mental association, attributes of the word and of the thing are equated. The ignobility of scientist, as long as it was felt to be so, lessened the stature of those designated by it. After many years the current ran the opposite way, and the name acquired the honour paid to the individuals who carried it. At first, however, and until ca. 1910, careful writers in Britain used scientist only as a colloquialism, the phrase ' man of science ' being used in formal discourse or writ ing: for example, the title-pages of the earliest volumes, from 1888 to 1914, of the great Oxford English Dictionary carry the line : ' With the assistance of many scholars and men of science. '

20 Mr P. J. Wexler has found tha t the O.E.D. credits Whewell with the first recorded use, and in m a n y cases with the invention, of 21 words (and doubtless many others), to which Mr Wexler has added 41 more first a t tes tat ions from Whewell 's books and letters. See ' The great nomenclator : Whewell 's contr ibut ions to scientific terminology ' in Notes and Queries, N.S., 1961, 8, 27. Whewell would not, however, have approved the implication in the title of Mr Wexlor 's paper tha t nomenclature and terminology are synonyms ; he distinguished between them emphatically and repeatedly.

~1 O.E.D. under scient, citing Ibis, Oct. 1894, p. 555.


76 Sydney Ross on

The American advocacy of scientist also mil i ta ted against its acceptance. Few Englishmen would have expressed themselves so positively, bu t m a n y would have sympath ized with Ruskin 's observat ion : ' England t aug h t the Americans all t hey have of speech, or thought , hi ther to . W h a t thoughts t hey have not learned from England are foolish thoughts ; wha t words they have not learned from England, unseemly words. ' ~ Alexander J. Ellis, F.R.S. , president of the Philological Society, concurred. In a le t ter published in the Academy for 19 September, 1874, he confidently affirmed scientist to be ' an American barbarous trisyllable, ' for which he would have subs t i tu ted the disyllable scient. He also took the oppor- t un i t y of proposing the adopt ion of uty, utians, phiUogy, and phillogs, in place of utilitarianism, utilitarians, philology, and philologists. I n his t ranslat ions of Helmholtz , however, Ellis used physicist, though in view of his desire to remove excess syllables one might well expect t h a t he would have preferred physist, or even, as befi t ted an advocate of simplified spelling and the founder of the periodical The Fonetic Frend, the version fizzist.

T w e n t y years later considerable public a t ten t ion was drawn to the word scientist. J . T . Carrington, the edi tor of Science-Gossip, entered a protes t against its use, in which he said :

Its application is not satisfactory, and is usually the offspring of a paucity of erudition and expression which comes of the modern system of cramming with text-books, and general hurry in education. Why not speak of nomenclators as ' nameists, ' or a sempstress as a ' sewist, ' or a conchologist as a ' shellist. ' All these words may come into usc among ' progressivists, ' but are equally abominable with 'scientists . '

This ex t r ac t was copied by several daily newspapers, and aroused some comment , adverse to the word. Desiring an ' au thor i ta t ive declarat ion ' Carrington asked eight prominent personages for their opinions, seven of whom at once replied. The following are the answers he received :~a

His Grace the Duke of Argyll, K.G., K.T., F.R.S. Gosford, Longniddry, N.B. ; December 8th, 1894.

Sir, In reply to your question, I can only answer for myself, that I never

use the word ' Scientist ' in any serious literary work, and that I regard it with great dislike.

Yours obediently, Argyll.

22 j . Ruskin, Fors clavlgera, Orpington, Kent, 1874, Let ter 42, p. 118. Reprinted in Works, ed. Cook and Wedderburn, London, 1907, vol. xxviii., p. 92.

23 Science.gossip, N.S., 1894, 1, 242-3.


Scientis~ : The Story of a Word 77

The Right Hon. ~ir ,John Lubbock, Bart., M,P,. F.R.S. High Elms, Farnborough, t~,.S.O., Ken t ; 7th December, 1894.

Sir, I quite concur with you as to the word ' Scientist, ' and have never

used it myself. Why not retain the old word ' Philosopher. ' I am, your Obedient Servant ,

John Lubbock

Professor Alfred Russel Wallace, F.R.~. Parkstone, Dorset ; December 8th, 1894.

Dear Sir, I thought the very useful American term ' S c i e n t i s t ' was now

adopted, and I see Dr Armstrong used it at the Chemical Society, yesterday. As we have Biologist, Zoologist, Geologist, Botanist , Chemist, Physicist, Physiologist and Specialist, why should we not use ' Scientist ' ? I t seems to me tha t it has, as the Americans say, ' come to stay, ' and it is too late in the day to object to it.

Yours very truly, Alfred g . Wallace.

Mr Grant Allen, a popular writer. The Croft, Hind Head, Haslemere ; December 20th, 1894.

Dear Sir, Personally I dislike the word ' S c i e n t i s t ' and never admit it into

my own vocabulary. No fellow is compelled to use any particular word himself unless he chooses. ' Man of Scie1~ce ' seems to me to do the du ty well enough for any purpose. But T fully recognise the fi~ct tha t languages grow, and grow irresponsibly. If the majori ty of the persons who speak a part icular language choose to adopt a new word, however ill-formed, it is mere pedant ry for individuals to object to it. We have swallowed ' Sociology ' ; we have swallowed ' Altruism ' ; and I don ' t see why, after camels like those, we need strain at a comparative gna t like ' Scientist. ' I t has come to stay. Many of us don ' t like it ; bu t ] am afraid we have only the usual a l te rna t ive- -of lumping it.

Fai thful ly yore's, Grant Allen.

The Right llon. Lord Rayleigh, F.R.S. Terling Place, Witham, Essex ; 10th December, 1894.

Dear Sir, I dislike the word ' Scientist ' and have never used it myself ; bu t

I foresee a difficulty in avoiding it unless a subst i tute can be provided. Lord Kelvin ' s suggestion of reverting to the wider meaning of 'Natura l is t ' might afford a solution.

Yours faithfully, Rayleigh.


78 S ydney Ross on

The Right Hen. Thos. H. Huxley, F.R.S. Hodeslea, Staveley Road, Eastbourne ; December 10th, 1894.

Sir, To any one who respects the English language, I think ' Scientist '

must be about as pleasing a word as ' Electrocution.' I sincerely trust you will not allow the pages of Science-Gossip to be defiled by it.

am, yours sincerely, Thos. H. Huxley.

Dr Albert Gi~nther, F.R.S., Head of the Zoological Department of the British Museum.

British Museum, Cromwell Road, London, W. ; December 13th 1894

Dear Sir, The illegitimacy of formation of the word 'Sc i en t i s t ' has been

sufficiently exposed in the daily press of a week or so ago. I believe it has been shown to be an American importation. However, as within the last quarter of a century a crowd of writers has sprung up who dabble in science, and especially in the great scientific questions of our time, the word 'Sc i en t i s t ' might be retained as an appropriate term for this class.

Yours truly, A. Gfinther.

IV. Ha l l ' s Defence of Scientist

The grounds of the opposi t ion hav ing been defined in such na r row terms, it mere ly required a learned and ar t icula te scholar to over th row it complete ly . The Amer ican philologist, F i t zedward H~ll (1825-1901), then residing in England , was such a man . He was angered b y the i r ra t ional a n t i p a t h y of some Bri t ish writers to a n y words t hey suspected of or iginat ing in America. Hal l h imsel f was unspar ing in his crit icisms of his c o u n t r y m e n for the deter iora t ion of the Engl ish tongue in the Uni t ed States , as the following passage shows.

By nobody who is capable of judging can it be gainsaid, and it behooves a wise patriot to acknowledge and to lament, that the phrase- ology of nearly all our recent popular authors is tarnished with vulgar- isms, imported and indigenous, at which a cultivated taste cannot but revolt. Nor is this the sole uncouth trai t that sullies the written style of the great body of our fellow-countrymen. Conspicuous, with them, almost in like degree, are slovenliness, want of lucidity, breach of established idiom, faulty grammar, and needless Americanisms, general or sectional, Of these offences against the aesthetics of literary compo-


Sc ien t i s t : The Story o f a Word 79

sition they are seen, moreover, to show themselves, year by year, increasingly regardless. 24

T h e m a n w h o w r o t e t h a t c a n n o t be accused of e n t e r t a i n i n g a b l ind

p a r t i a l i t y t o w a r d s t h e v e r b a l m a l p r a c t i c e s of his c o u n t r y m e n . B u t , H a l l

i nqu i r ed , is i t this , a d m i t t e d l y dep lo rab le , s t a t e of t h ings a lone t h a t so

o f t en p r o m p t s an E n g l i s h m a n to d e n o u n c e o f f h a n d as an A m e r i c a n i s m

a n y exp re s s ion t h a t offends h i m ? H a l l su spec t ed an a n i m u s aga ins t

his c o u n t r y - - a h o s t i l i t y t h a t was g l ad to seize a n y grounds , real or

fanc ied , for d i s p a r a g e m e n t . F o r m o r e t h a n t h i r t y yea r s he h a d co l lec ted ,

f r o m E n g l i s h n e w s p a p e r s and per iodica ls , e x a m p l e s o f den ig ra t ion ,

a m o n g s t w h i c h scientist f igured f r e q u e n t l y . H e r e is some of his t e s t i m o n y :

In The Guardian for March 6, 1878, a reviewer characterized scientist as ' v e r y ques t ionab le . ' A note to the editor, in which I main ta ined tha t much could be advanced in its favour, was denied publication. Within six months The Guardian again a t tacked the word, and I again came forward to defend it, but with the same issue as before.

On the 20th of September, 1890, the London Daily News branded scientist as an ' i gnob le A m e r i c a n i s m ' and as a ' c h e a p and vulgar product of t rans-Atlant ic s l ang . ' In correction of this description of it, I wrote to tha t journal, point ing out that , in 1840, it was advocated, together with physicist, by Dr Whewell, as though of his own fabricating. My communicat ion never saw the light. To print i t might have checked the diffusion of an error which affronted van i ty preferred to the t ru th . . . . On the 30th of last November [1894], the Daily News re turned to the word under correction, apparent ly approving a censure whicil had been passed on it in Science-Gossip. A let ter in reply, an expansion of my former one, which I at once drew up and addressed to the Daily News, shared the fate of its fellow, in feeding the editorial waste-paper basket. ~

24 Fitzedward I-Iall, Two trifles : I. A rejoinder. II. Scientist, with a preamble. Privately printed, London, 1895, pp. 2-3.

Fitzedward Hall was born in Troy, New York, and obtained the degree of C. E. (Civil Engineer) at l~ensselaer Institute (now Rensselaer :Polytechnic Institute) in 1842, at the age of eighteen. From timre he went to Harvard College where he graduated with the class of 1846. The remainder of his long life was passed in India and in England. He was the first American to edit (in 1852) a Sanskrit text. He also discovered several interesting Sanskrit works supposed to have been lost. The various Sanskrit inscriptions that he deciphered and translated threw much new light on the history of ancient India. The importance of these contributions to scholarship was acknowledged by the University of Oxford, which conferred on him an honorary doctor's degree (D.C.L.) in 1860, when Hall was thirty-five years old--unusually young for such a distinction. Two years later he was appointed to the chair of Sanskrit and Indian jurisprudence at King's College, London. Hall now became known as a scholar of English philology. The undertaking of tile New English Dictionary by the Philological Society brought him the opportunity to put to use his enormous collection of English words, phrases, and idioms, containing quotations from thousands of books of the previous four centuries--the fl'uits of a lifetime's study and reading. His devoted and unselfish services were given gratuitously, as a labour of love, for many years. Murray's special acknowledgements of his services to the Dictionary are to be found in the various prefaces to the separate volumes.

,.,5 Ref. 24, pp. 25 6.


80 Sydney g o s s on

Of the let ters previously quoted f rom Science-Gossip, Huxley ' s was the one whose peevish tone was most likely to d raw Ha l l ' s wra th fu l a t t en t ion ; by ment ioning electrocution, an American ' blend ' of electricity ~-execution, H u x l e y showed t h a t he considered scientist to be an equal ly unscholar ly Americanism. Hal l ' s i r r i ta t ion a t Huxley , agg rava t ed by the cumula t ive effect of the o ther examples he had come across, induced h im to unde r t ake a full- length defence of scientist, which he presented, in the m a n n e r of Landor ' s Imaginary Conversations, as a dialogue be tween Professor Huxley , then a formidable opponen t wi th whom to engage in cont roversy , and the shade of Dr Whewell.eG The s tyle of Ha l l ' s imag ina ry t~te-£-t~te was l ively and the hum our appropr i a t e ly philological. As the publ ica t ion is ha rd to come by, lavish quo ta t ion is justified.

Since, in the flesh, Dr Whewell was never backward in asserting himself, let it be imagined that, in his excarnate ~ttenuation, he is so still. And let it be farther imagined that, released awhile from the shades, in the course of a round of calls he visits Professor Huxley in his study. These conditions fulfilled, what follows may, conceivably, be supposable.

Dr W. (considerably materialized). Good morning! Don' t mind my abruptness. I have come to pick a bone with you. As an anatomist, and a trifle osseously hard in manner, you will allow that my metaphor is not inappropriate.

Prof. H. (impatiently). Who are you ? Dr W. A wit once said, of somebody, that science was his forte, and

omniscience his foible. To the successor of that myth, realized, I make my obeisance. (Genuflects.)

Prof. H. (more impatiently). I ask you who yon are, and what are you driving at.

Dr W. I am advancing pedetcntously. 2: Prof. H. (visibly.fidgeting). Your bearing is rllde, while your English

is peculiar. Dr W. I never particularly studied the graces ; but my jocular

pedetentously will compare advantageously with your serious xenogenesis. Prof. H. (subirascently). You are intrusive and impertinent. You

will be so good as to leave the room. Dr W. Pardon me, worthy Professor. Out on ticket of leave from

Hades, and ' going to and fro in the earth, ' I have taken the liberty of dropping in on you. I am Dr Whewell.

Prof. H. (smiling). Solidiform spirits, whether hylomorphous or otherwise, are an object of rational curiosity ; and for 37raye E~.~'~.v2 I gladly substitute X~pe 8 ~ a K ~ e .

~.6 ge l . 24. 27 p e d e t e n t o u s l y : proceeding step by step, cautiously. This word was not coined by

Whcwell, as Hall seems to claim, bu t by Sydney Smith in 1837. Smith was also the au thor of the epigram on Whewell quoted in the text : ' science is his forte and omniseenee his

foible '.



After this prel iminary banter, HM1, speaking in the rSle of Dr Whewell, outlines three possible justifications for scientist, based on analogies with the format ion of other well-accepted words :

1. What if I took the stem seen in scientific, as also in scientia, duly modified it, and added -ist to the result ? My proceeding would be much about the same as that of whoever fashioned deists, ddiste, or deist. Here the full stem, dee-, is weakened into dei-, and this, before -ista, -iste, -ist, is truncated to de-, i being elided to preclude a hiatus. Of the final i of scienti- there is, towards the making of my word, also elision. If scientia had not scire behind it, scientist would, accordingly, be every whit as good as aurist, dentist, florist, jurist, oculist, and the old copist, now copyist. Where I indulged in a lieenee was in operating, not on the stem of a substantive, but on that of a part of a verb, a present participle. Surely, you would not quarrel with colloquist, determinist, funambnlist, noctambulist, somnambulist, and ventriloquist, which differ only slightly from scientist ?

2. But I have not yet done. Dissatisfied with the German obslcurant and the French obscurant, we give the preference to the elongated obscurantist. Be it, then, alternatively, that we have, in scientist, -ist suffixed to the old adjective scient, occurring in Lydgate and Bp. John King ; in which case it is, as regards its elements, analogous to absolntist, extremist, indifferentist, positivist.

3. Once again, what if I guided myself, in my straits, solely by the demands of expedience and euphony, and simply fastened -ist to the scient- of scientific, satisfied with combining constituents unmistakable of import into a whole nowise less perspicuous ? Beside the numerous existing compounds which gravel ordinary folk so vexatiously, mine, with its convenience and instant intelligi~bility, is, I contend, in the highest degree creditable. Well is it ~ble to stand on its own worth. Faulty as it is acknowledged to be, I have been assured that not one philologist of the slightest repute has as yet declared against it,, under a praet, ieal aspect. And I predict that it will live.

Hall concludes :

Anomalous in structure as scientist admittedly is, still, now that, after Dr Johnson's rimist, we have got, composedly, to landseapist, red-tapist, routinist, and faddist, there seems to be every likelihood that utility will soon legitimate it, as it has legitimated botany, facsimile, idolatry, monomial, orthopedic, posthumous, racial, suicide, tdegram, tractarian, and vegetarian, to name a few established irregularities.

The passage of the years since 1895 completely confirmed Hall 's prophecy tha t the word would live. Even while the debate about its propriety was going on, the word was becoming more and more firmly embedded in the language ; it was not to be eradicated by a few expressions of distaste, however eminent their source and oracular their style of delivery. Hall 's defenee of scientist cannot be given credit for its modern acceptance, nor can he even be credited with having convinced his contemporaries to overcome their dislike of the word. However,

Ann. of Sci.---Vol. 18, No. 2.


82 Sydney Ross on

the next generation of writers did not share the scruples of their prede- cessors ; the arguments that could be brought against the word had been deprived of their force by Hall's essay on the subject. What may be regarded as the last comment on the controversy was made unconsciously by a modern biographer of Huxley : on the title-page of his book, in all innocence, he applied the hated word to the great man himself. 2s This was indeed a cruel stroke by Fate, yet so delightfully apt that no Mikado in search of poetic justice could have improved upon it.

V. Scientist in Modern Use

Common speech having sanctioned the narrower meanings of science and scientist, the words continued to take a part in further socio-cultural evolution. Here are some examples of modern 'usage and abusage. '

1. Today, science denotes more than physical science: any disci- pline is said to be scientific when it consciously employs mental attitudes and techniques developed by practitioners of physical science : scepticism of authority ; dispassionate description of phenomena ; the framing of hypotheses capable of being tested ; and the measurement of the limits of reliability of data. Examples of this usage occur in the expressions ' the biological sciences ' and ' the social sciences,' both of which were in use before the end of the 19th century.

One observes, however, that a higher status is claimed by and generally accorded to the physical and biological sciences, and to physics in particular. Perhaps as a result, physicists display an intellectual arrogance and snobbishness that is sufficiently pronounced to be recognizable as a professional characteristic. The following witty sneer--the sneer at least is typical--was reported in the course of a tea-table conversation with a Russian physicist at a recent International Conference on Science and Human Welfare : 29

] mentioned that an increasing number of social scientists had been coming to Pugwash Conferences, and [Academician L. A.] Artsimovich made a face. Generally speaking, he said, he found social scientists a pretty ineffective bunch. 'Gatherers of material,' he said. 'Fi f ty years ago, Professor Rutherford, the great British physicist, said that scientists were divided into two categories--physicists and stamp collectors.'

2. Another extension, of more recent vintage, is derived from physical science viewed as providing the rationale for certain traditional processes, such as cooking, dyeing, the making of soap, glass, or ceramics ; from this by analogy are obtained terms for new disciplines (or old ones

as Cyril Bibby, T. H. Huxley : Scientist, Humanist, and Educator London, 1959. ~9 Daniel Lang, The New Yorker, 21 December 1963, p. 54.



glamourized) such as domestic science, military science, sanitary science, building science, and library science, to denote the s tudy of the theory underlying their respective practices. These examples, however, are the local usages of some American universities and are not fully accepted elsewhere.

3. Bu t if science can be extended thus far, others will extend it further. In the excessive populari ty of science, scientist, and scientific in the newspaper vocabulary, the process of extension is carried nearly all the way to nonsense. These words, according to a modern scholar, 3° are ' used too much, and by the wrong people ' ; they are ' vogue-words ' of high prestige, bandied about for effect, bu t based on vague and impre- cise notions of what they s tand for. The patient , dedicated men and women, the living realities of the word scientist, working in laboratories and communicating in an esoteric language only with their peers, do not satisfy the general craving for definitive answers to social, economic, and political problems, which, so the great half-educated has been led to expect, ' science ' has it in its power to deliver. An abstraction named ' the scientist ' has been given form in people's minds as a new figure of authori ty, corresponding to the priest or witch-doctor of a more primitive culture, whose ' sc ien t i f ic ' s ta tements can be accepted with child-like reliance. The notion is dangerous not merely because it is untrue but because it is irrational. The quest for absolute scientific validity is as hopeless as the quest for the philosopher's stone. There may be incidental good in a political or religious philosophy tha t claims ' Scientific ' author- i ty and tha t stands ready to identify itself with the ready-made image in the popular mind of the infallibility of science ; but the willingness to assume and exploit tha t r61e betrays the unprincipled shrewdness of the publicist. Dialectical materialism originated about a hundred years ago, precisely when science acquired its modern significance and status. Marx himself studied his subject-matter in the spirit of scientific understanding, bu t Marxist writers exalted the letter rather than the spirit of his approach ; according to them ' dialectical materialism is scientific m e t h o d ' ; the leaders of world communism are thereby sanctioned to style themselves scientists. 31 But they demand an uncritical submission to au thor i ty tha t is entirely contrary to the spirit of the

s0 E. Partr idge and J. W. Clark, British and American English ,since 1900, New York,

1951, pp. 236-8. ~1 The following remarks suppor t the assertion in the tex t :

They were ' dialectical materialists ' ; tha t is, t rue scientists. The t ru th they spoke was scientific t ru th . They knew the laws of social action, and their speech embodied tha t law. They knew history and they spoke in its name . . . . Theirs was the conceit of history. J . T. Fan'ell, Literature and Morality, New York, 1947,

p. 159.

F 2


84 Sydney l~oss on

physical sciences, the spirit succinctly expressed by the Horatian phrase nullius in verba. In Christian Science, likewise, whatever its spiritual value, we have another example of the introduction of the terms science and scientist to a context where they are inapplicable. The practice could be exemplified further in a host of minor charlatanisms, particularly in the advertising of goods or services to the public. The remedy lies in a broadening of general culture to include both a sounder knowledge of what science really is, and an educated dislike of laxness in the choice of words. The latter desideratum, unfortunately, is becoming every year increasingly harder to achieve. The development of the language, the Zeitgeist as it were in matters linguistic, is not in a direction to preserve the nuances, or even grosser distinctions of meaning. The scholars who might be expected to protect the heritage, enriched and refined through the centuries, of an incomparable language, are to be found aiding the forces of at tr i t ion--and, as a final paradox, in the name of science.

The study of language, now re-named linguistic science, is one of a number of disciplines tha t were formerly fields of scholarship but are now eager to be classified with the sciences. The assumption of the currently more honorific name demands a change of attitude on the part of its disciples ; a new orientation of studies is required that can give credibility to their claim to be scientists. Is not science a dispassionate recording of facts, uncontaminated by value judgments ? The new school of linguistic scientists, in accord with this concept of science, refuses to condemn as incorrect any departure, no matter how illiterate, if only it is sufficiently widespread, from what is traditionally accepted as good speech. The editors of the most recent (1961) unabridged dictionary of the English language, Webster's New International Dictionary, third edition, belonged to this school of thought. The power of the word science was their patent of authority to include in their dictionary a mass of ephemeral terms, and also to accept as standard English a great many tha t prior to their time had been labelled vulgar and colloquial, or, even more bluntly, erroneous, as The atti tude behind these decisions is called ' permissiveness ' ; it styles itself scientific ; but it is likewise clearly in harmony with a sour puritanical dislike of authority and tradition. In the history of the interactions between science and society we have

as Most of t h e reviews of t h e :Dictionary in t he Amer i can popu la r press were adverse , t h o u g h some were unfa i r ly so. T h a t of the :New York Times h a d t he sal t of wi t :

A passel of doub le -domes a t t h e G. & C. Merr iam C o m p a n y joint in Springfield, Mass. [its editorial began] , h a v e been confabb ing a n d y a k k i n g for t w e n t y - s e v e n y e a r s - - w h i c h is n o t i n t e n d e d to infer t h a t t h e y have no t been doing p l en ty w o r k - - a n d n o w t h e y h a v e finalized W e b s t e r ' s Th i rd :New In t e rna t i ona l Dic t ionary , Unabr idged , a n e w edi t ion of t h a t swell a n d e s t eemed word book.

Those who regard t h e foregoing p a r a g r a p h as acceptable Eng l i sh prose will find t h e new W e b s t e r ' s is j u s t the d ic t ionary for t hem.



already experienced the effects of the missionary zeal that stems from such a combination of moral and scientific fervour ; it has been the corrosive solvent of much that we may now regret having lost. Operating on the language, through the medium of an influential dictionary, the same spirit promotes the systematic relaxation of standards. Necessary distinctions and useful shades of meaning will be swept away if the irresponsible flow of slovenly English from the daily press is not to be checked. Scientists especially have to insist on retaining sharp distinctions of meaning between words ; more so than humanists they are required to attend to nice differences. The following pairs, for example, are synonymous in popular speech but are not so to physical scientists : speed and velocity, stress and strain, mass and weight, force and pressure, accuracy and precision, dense and heavy. Thus common speech and the language of science are growing even further apart, to the detriment of both. Indeed every intellectual activity, not science alone, is hurt by the democratization of the language. The very process of thinking becomes less penetrating when the words that, it uses have lost their precision.


Annals of Science. PLATE I I I

WILLIAM WHEWELL


Annals of Science. PLATE IV

FITZEDWARD HALL

By courtesy of Mr. J~. Homer ttall of Tryon, North Carolina.


Annals of Science. PLATE V

T h e r evenge of t i m e : H u x l e y desc r ibed as a scientist.


ross 1964 scientist the story of a word

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