The lexicon is the technical name for the stock of ready-made items that the language contains. These are not only words, but idiomatic expressions like put down (meaning ‘suppress’) and put out feelers (meaning ‘make tentative inquiries’). The items that make up the lexicon are the lexical stock of the language. Naturally, in the course of history, the lexical stock of a language undergoes many and far-reaching changes. One way of increasing it is to create new words by recombining the elements out of which existing words are constructed. Another way is to borrow words from other languages— loan words; in the list of nouns given above for talking about print-making (p. 25), the words burin and pochoir are from French. In the course of its history, English has borrowed many words from foreign sources, thus acquiring sets of words that have a structural resemblance to each other. The words creature, nature, posture, pleasure, etc. all came from an earlier form of French. The ending -ure can be recognized as a noun-forming suffix, even though the stems to which it is attached do not exist as separate words: create-, nat-, post-, pleas-. Of course we
can see a connection between creat- and the verbto create, and between pleas-, and the verb to please, but such connections are ghostly remnants of the connections between words in the original language. Another result of borrowing from other languages is that we have ‘imported’ certain kinds of compound word. Words like democrat and homicide are compounds in the languages of origin (Greek and Latin respectively). If we just had these two words, their origin as compounds would not be apparent. But since they are paralleled by autocrat and demography on the one hand, and suicide on the other, we are consious of the possibility of seeing the words as made up of parts. This provides us with a model for coining new words like plutocrat, bureaucrat and herbicide. Thus the lexicon of English is a kind of unmethodical, scrapbook record of the history of the language, and the extent to which it is valid to describe words like the present-day word pleasure as having the structure: pleas+ure is doubtful. Even when the elements of which a word is made can be confidently identified, as with good+ness, we must still regard the word as, to a certain extent, a ready-made item. It is not possible to predict, from a knowledge of the elements good and ness, that one of the meanings of goodness is ‘the quality of being nutritious’ (used of food). Similarly with compounds. For example, blackboard means ‘a surface for writing on with chalk in classrooms’; any connection with the sense of the words black and board is rather tenuous. Some blackboards are not black, many are not boards, and neither black nor board tells us anything about writing or education. Patterns of derivation and composition, therefore, tend to be partial and unpredictable. (Exercise 23 is
on p. 34.)