Thus, to deal again with
bribes, call a bribe 'palm oil,' or a 'pot de vin,' and how much of its
ugliness disappears. Far more moral words are the English 'sharper' and
'blackleg' than the French 'chevalier d'industrie': [Footnote: For the
rise of this phrase, see Lemontey, _Louis XIV_. p. 43.] and the same
holds good of the English equivalent, coarse as it is, for the Latin
'conciliatrix.' In this last word we have a notable example of the
putting of sweet for bitter, of the attempt to present a disgraceful
occupation on an amiable, almost a sentimental side, rather than in its
own proper deformity. [Footnote: This tendency of men to throw the
mantle of an honourable word over a dishonourable thing, or, vice versa,
to degrade an honourable thing, when they do not love it, by a
dishonourable appellation, has in Greek a word to describe it, [Greek:
hypokorizesthai], itself a word with an interesting history; while the
great ethical teachers of Greece frequently occupy themselves in
detecting and denouncing this most mischievous among all the impostures
of words. Thus, when Thucydides (iii. 82) would paint the fearful moral
ruin which her great Civil War had wrought, he adduces this alteration
of the received value of words, this fitting of false names to
everything--names of honour to the base, and of baseness to the
honourable--as one of the most remarkable tokens of this, even as it
again set forward the evil, of which it had been first the result.
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