On Certain Abuses in Language [pp. 248-272]

THE PR1INCE TOAN RE VIEW.
such an utter lack of likeness between the two things that I
cannot account for the use of the name in any way but by supposing the twofold confusion of which I have just spoken.
In this case of Areiopagos the word has not passed into common use. It is still used consciously as a figure, witha direct,
tho misleading, reference to the Areiopagos at Athens. There
are other technical words of Greek polity which have passed
into common use, and from which the remembrance of their
original meaning has largely passed away, tho not quite so
harmlessly as in the case of the Latin inauguration. I might
indeed ask, by the way, why the followers of Achilleus, the
Myrmidons, have undergone a fate which is shared by no other
division of the Achaian host before Ilios. I do not remember
that any other peQple in the Homeric catalogue have come to
be written with a small letter, or that it is thought smart to call
policemen or sheriffs' officers by their national name. I might
also ask, by the way, why the sphinx and the sirens so commonly
take possession of a longer letter than they have any.claim to, and
constantly appear as splzynx and syrens. I might ask too why
the latter name gets so often applied to various persons who
are not at all like the sweet singers of the Odyssey. I might
ask again why the crane's enemy, the pygmy, who has the best
of rights to that specially Greek letter to which the sphinx
and the sirens have no claim, is so commonly deprived of his
rightful spelling, and is, perhaps on account of his small size,
put off, under the form of pigmy, with the smallest letter either
in the Greek or the Latin alphabet. But I pass to words where
the misuse is of greater importance. Let us take the word
tyrant. In old Greece that word had a very distinct meaning.
It meant a man who had taken to himself kingly power in a
state where there was no king by law. It referred to the way
in which power was gained, not to the way in which it was
used. Most of the Greek tyrants were oppressive rulers, but
-all were not so. To speak of a just and merciful tyrant was
not a contradiction in terms; the class was certainly rare, but it
was not unknown. Under the Roman Empire the word was
used in a sense exactly analogous, a sense just so far modified
as it could not fail to be modified in passing from a commonwealth to a monarchy. The tyrant was now the usurper, the
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