Holland and elements of jurisprudence and invious and envious and devious

I realized in the past day or so that most of my reading in the past week or so has been of nineteenth century authors. This isn't necessarily remarkable, though it did make me aware of the way that words might have been used in a different sense in those days than in ours. I came across about five phrases or individual words that repay mention here. The purpose of writing this essay, then, is to encourage us to slow down as we negotiate the angularities and singularities of 19th century English. The words/phrases I would like to examine are "wonderful," "devious," "superfluously," "abnormal," and "comparative Histology."

Wonderful

Let's begin with one instance where the "stretch" between current and 19th century usage is not great. In an 1886 oration at Harvard Law School, OW Holmes, Jr., begins: "It is not wonderful that the graduates of the Law School of Harvard College should wish to keep alive their connection with it" (Occasional Speeches, 34). Normally today we think of wonderful in the sense of "marvellous" or "surprisingly large, fine, excellent" or, in the Collegiate, "admirable." As GW Bush said to his staff after Hurricane Katrina cleanup had begun, "You guys did a wonderful job." But if we read that sense of "wonderful" back into Holmes' speech, we would have him saying, 'It isn't admirable for you to keep alive your connection with HLS.' Of course he was saying nothing of the sort. He was using the word "wonderful" in its more basic or original sense as something "full of wonder," or "such as to excite wonder or astonishment." Thus he is saying that it isn't something astonishing for people to maintain their emotional ties to HLS. An earlier quotation from 1632: "They made a wonderfull massacre of poore afflicted Christians." If someone is a "wonderful" soldier, he is one who evokes a sense of wonder or amazement in onlookers.

Devious

The word devious, which literally means "out of the way," is used almost exclusively in our conversation in 2005 to mean someone who is crafty, cunning or deceptive. We can have a devious trick or devious conduct. Most of us are vaguely aware that there is something about "wandering" or being "errant" in the word, but we don't use it other than in the moral sense of a person who has misled someone else. But then I read the preface to Holland's eighth edition of Elements of Jurisprudence (1900) and there it appears (vi). He has been explaining that the English common law resisted jurisprudential treatment for hundreds of years. However, earlier scholars had on occasion published books of "Leading Cases," which Holland characterizes as follows: "selected almost at random, and to group round each a collection of subordinate decisions, in which the rule recognized in the principle case is deviously tracked in the various applications." In other words, older authors tried to isolate a basic rule of law in the "principle" case, which rule was then discovered in a series of other cases. Devious means "deviating or swerving from the straight way; erring, straying." It can also mean "with wandering or straying course" or "circuitous." "Those men...precipitate themselves into devious enormities" or, from 1638: "Yet still this devious Error draws me backward." By saying that a legal rule is deviously tracked in other cases, Holland means that one had to "swerve" from the "straight path" to find these cases or, alternatively, that one had to "wander" to find them. But the word shouldn't necessarily have a negative connotation, as this 1742 quotation, by ascribing the word to God, demonstrates:

"God...deviously turns the natural bias of its malignity to the advancement of human happiness."

Well, since devious means "out of the way," and originally meant a straying or wandering, I wondered if the English word envious meand something opposite to devious--that is, something that stayed in the path. But then I studied the etymology of envious and learned that it was derived from the Latin invidia, which simply means "envy." No connection at all between devious and envious.

However, English does have the word invious, which literally means "having no roads or ways; pathless, trackless." [The "in" prefix can either be an intensifier or a negater. It serves as the latter in invious.] We have the following from Peacham: "Sertorius..could leap broken and unapsseable Rockes and like invious places." "The skilled guide can make his way even in the most invious of wildnernesses."

Superfluously

Let's conclude this essay with superfluously. When we speak the word superfluous in 2005 we mean something that is unnecessary. "A coat on top of the sweater would be superfluous in the 80 degree heat." And so the OED attests a similar usage for superfluously--"without necessity, unnecesarily, needlessly." Another theological use, from 1653: "Discriminative Providence ...doing nothing superfluously or in vain." But an older usage of superfluously means something slightly different: "more than sufficiently; in excess of what is proper or necessary; superabundantly." That is, the difference has to do with whether something is unnecesary or in excess of what is needed. A quotation from 1615 illustrates the difference: "To dresse the roots of trees, to take away the tawes, and tangles, that ..grow superfluously and disorderly." That is, the tangled leaves grow in excess and not "unnecessarily." With this distinction in mind, let's return to Holland. He says, in criticizing John Austin's jurisprudence,

"It presents the spectacle of a powerful and conscientious mind struggling with an intractable and rarely handled material, while those distinctions upon which Austin after somewhat superfluously careful manner bestows most labor are put in so clear a light that they can hardly again be lost sight of" (vii).

Here the meaning of superfluously is something that is done in excess of what is required rather than something unnecessary. Austin is overly careful, rather than unnecessarily careful.

The next essay explores a two more words/phrases.

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