"information," or rather deformation, everywhere, and to the
teaching of catechisms and phrases at school instead of human
meanings)--there are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody
understands, but which everybody uses, and most people will also
fight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this or
that, or the other, of things dear to them: for such words wear
chameleon cloaks--"ground-lion" cloaks, of the colour of the ground
of any man's fancy: on that ground they lie in wait, and rend them
with a spring from it. There never were creatures of prey so
mischievous, never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners so
deadly, as these masked words; they are the unjust stewards of all
men's ideas: whatever fancy or favourite instinct a man most
cherishes, he gives to his favourite masked word to take care of for
him; the word at last comes to have an infinite power over him,--you
cannot get at him but by its ministry.

And in languages so mongrel in breed as the English, there is a
fatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, almost whether
they will or no, in being able to use Greek or Latin words for an
idea when they want it to be awful; and Saxon or otherwise common
words when they want it to be vulgar. What a singular and salutary
effect, for instance, would be produced on the minds of people who
are in the habit of taking the Form of the "Word" they live by, for
the Power of which that Word tells them, if we always either
retained, or refused, the Greek form "biblos," or "biblion," as the
right expression for "book"--instead of employing it only in the one
instance in which we wish to give dignity to the idea, and
translating it into English everywhere else. How wholesome it would
be for many simple persons if, in such places (for instance) as Acts
xix. 19, we retained the Greek expression, instead of translating