History in English Words

Owen Barfield

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Excerpt: If somebody showed us a document which he said was an unpublished letter of Dr. Johnson?s, and on reading it through we ...

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Excerpt: If somebody showed us a document which he said was an unpublished letter of Dr. Johnson?s, and on reading it through we came across the word ?telephone?, we should be fairly justified in sending him about his business. The fact that there was no such thing as a telephone until many years after Johnson?s death would leave no doubt whatever in our minds that the letter was not written by him. If we cared to go farther, we could say with equal certainty that the letter was written since the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the telephone was invented. Now suppose that there had been nothing about telephones in the letter, but that it had contained an account of a thunder-storm. If in describing the stillness just before the storm broke the writer had said that ?the atmosphere was electric?, we could still be fairly positive that he was not Dr. Johnson. But this time it would not be because the thing of which the letter spoke had no existence in Johnson?s day. No doubt the heavens during a storm a hundred and fifty years ago were exactly as highly charged with electricity as they are to-day; but if we look up the word electric in the Oxford Dictionary, we find that in Johnson?s time it simply was not used in that way. Thus, in his own dictionary it is defined as:A property in some bodies, whereby when rubbed so as to grow warm, they draw little bits of paper, or such-like substances, to them.