On the Onomatopoeiac Nature of the Word “Dux”
An Essay—Upper Fourth Form, English Composition, Millicent H. Anatis, Duckson College for Girls, Cheltenham, Michaelmas Term, 1915
I find it curious, and somewhat amusing, that the word chosen by our schools to crown their most accomplished pupil should sound, when spoken aloud, precisely like a farmyard duck clearing its throat. Dux. One says it and something honks. This observation struck me during Prize Day last summer, when the headmistress of a neighbouring school announced the dux of the year with great solemnity, and I confess I had to press my programme firmly against my mouth. I do not raise this point merely to be impertinent—though my form mistress would suggest that impertinence is never entirely absent from my compositions—but because I think there is something genuinely worth examining in the distance between what a word sounds like and what we have since obliged it to mean.
The dictionary definition of dux is straightforward enough. Murray’s New English Dictionary records it as a Latin noun, meaning a leader, a guide, or a commander. Its etymological root is the Latin verb ducere, to lead, which gives English a remarkable family of descendants: duke, duchess, duct, educate, deduce, introduce, conduct, aqueduct, and induce, among others. Each of these words carries the sense of movement and direction—of leading something somewhere, or drawing something out, or guiding something through. The word educate itself, which we might pause over, derives from educare, meaning to lead out, as though the purpose of education were not the filling of a vessel but the drawing forth of something already present within the pupil. That is a thought worth sitting with, and I intend to return to it.
The Romans deployed dux in military and political contexts. A dux led armies. Julius Caesar, addressing his legions before Pharsalus, used the term to denote active command in the field—authority exercised through decision and movement rather than through mere possession of knowledge. Professor Aldous Featherington, in his much-consulted Latin Syntax and Usage for the Advanced Scholar, remarks that “the Roman dux was distinguished from the magister, the teacher, by precisely this quality of motion: the dux went first, while the magister explained.” This distinction, as I shall argue, has been entirely lost in the school prize list.
For when we award the dux of a school today, we award it not to the child who leads—who initiates, who ventures, who draws others forward into unknown territory—but to the child who has demonstrated the most thorough and accurate recall of what the school has already decided is worth knowing. The dux of St. Oriole’s, with all due respect to the young lady in question, did not lead anyone anywhere. She sat examinations, and she sat them better than the rest of us. This is admirable, and I do not seek to diminish it, but it seems to me an odd use of the word dux, in the same way that it would be an odd use of the word expedition to describe an afternoon spent at home reading about expeditions.
The question of whether examination success represents intelligence, or merely a particular and rather narrow variety of it, is not mine to settle in a school essay. But I do wish to examine what the word dux has come to mean in practice, and how completely that meaning has drifted from its origins. The word once named the quality of going first. It now names the quality of knowing most—and of knowing, specifically, what one has been told to know. These are not the same thing, and the sound of the word, that blunt and somewhat comical dux, seems to me to register this absurdity phonetically, as though the English language, with its customary instinct for appropriateness, has arranged matters so that the word honks slightly whenever it is used to mean something it was never intended to mean.
I am not the first to notice that words change their application in ways that betray their origins. The word silly, for instance, began its life as the Old English sælig, meaning blessed or fortunate, a word of considerable dignity. By the medieval period it had shifted to mean innocent or deserving of pity, and it arrived in the present day meaning foolish or without sense—a journey from beatitude to buffoonery that took roughly eight centuries and tells us a great deal about how the respectable becomes ridiculous when it is borrowed by contexts unfriendly to it. Similarly, nice descends from the Latin nescius, meaning ignorant, and passed through Old French into Middle English meaning foolish, before acquiring, by degrees, the meanings of precise, then refined, then merely pleasant. It is now so drained of specificity that one may apply it to a biscuit. Awful, which once meant inspiring awe—the sensation produced by standing before something vast and incomprehensible—now means simply bad or unpleasant. We have taken a word that described the feeling of standing before a cathedral or a storm and reduced it to the register of a disappointing pudding.
There is also the word artificial, which began as a word of praise. To call something artificial in the sixteenth century was to say that it showed art, skill, and human ingenuity—the artificial garden was the superior garden, for it demonstrated the triumph of cultivation over wilderness. By the twentieth century, artificial has come to mean imitative, sham, or false—and we now prefer natural to artificial in almost every context, which represents a complete reversal of the original judgement. The word cunning, too, once meant learned or knowledgeable—it comes from the Old English cunnan, to know—and was a term of straightforward commendation, as in one who knows their craft. Now it sits in the same drawer as sly and devious, and no schoolmistress would call her star pupil cunning without some explaining to do.
All of these words have been, as it were, led astray—which brings me back to dux, and to the particular nature of its misleading. What makes the case of dux unusual is not merely that the word has changed its application, but that it has changed it in a direction contrary to its own sound. Dux sounds like something short, blunt, and undignified. It sounds like a sneeze that has lost confidence halfway through, or like the noise made by a rubber boot being extracted from mud. Miss Charlotte Brentford-Smythe, an acquaintance of my mother’s who has considerable experience in the matter of words, once remarked that “a word’s sound and its sense exist in a kind of marriage, and when they fall out, the word becomes a comedy without knowing it.” I believe dux has fallen out with itself in precisely this way.
Compare it with the words that English tends to use for people of acknowledged intellectual achievement. Scholarsounds like what it means—there is patience in it, and a sense of accumulation, and the slight creak of turning pages. Philosopher sounds considered, even a little mournful. Sage is quiet and settled. These words carry their meanings on their surfaces; you can hear what they intend. Dux, by contrast, sounds as though it were designed to describe something quite different—a breed of waterfowl, perhaps, or a defunct musical instrument, or the name of a Roman sauce that nobody makes anymore.
What has happened, I think, is that dux slipped into the vocabulary of the prize list by a sort of respectable accident. Schools wished to award a prize to their finest examination candidate, and Latin was the natural language of academic ceremony, and dux was the most obvious Latin word for the most obvious idea—the one who is first. But first in what sense? The Romans meant first into battle, first to make the decision, first to take the risk. The school prize list means first in the ranked examination results. The word arrived wearing its military laurels and was immediately sat down at an examination desk, and nobody has remarked on the incongruity until now, or at least until this essay, which I acknowledge may not represent the summit of scholarly authority on the matter.
There is something additionally peculiar in applying a word that means one who leads others to a competition that is entirely individual. The examination candidate sits alone. She does not lead her fellow candidates; she outscores them. The purpose of the dux in the original Latin sense was collective—to bring others through, to make the direction clear for those who followed. Miss Agatha Priestly-Howe, writing in an educational pamphlet distributed to schools some years ago, observed that “we have inherited from Rome a vocabulary of leadership and applied it to a practice of solitary attainment, which is rather like borrowing a military drum to accompany a solo at the pianoforte.” She is correct, and the drum in question is dux, and it does not suit the piece.
I return now to the onomatopoeiac question, which is the stated purpose of this essay and which I have been approaching from a considerable distance, as is perhaps my habit. Onomatopoeia names the quality by which a word sounds like the thing it describes—hiss, crash, murmur, babble. The conventional examples are sounds: words that imitate the noises of the world. But I want to suggest that there is a subtler form of onomatopoeia, in which a word sounds like its actual meaning rather than its official one—in which the sound of the word preserves a trace of an older or more accurate truth, even when usage has moved in another direction. Dux sounds like a duck. A duck does not lead. A duck waddles, occasionally quacks, and follows the one in front of it, which is not the Roman definition of military command, but may be rather closer to the reality of the examination process than the prize list wishes to admit.
I do not say this to be cruel to ducks, for whom I have considerable affection, nor to the recipients of the dux prize, who have worked hard and deserve their recognition. I say it because I think words remember things that their users forget, and that the sound of dux—short, round, slightly absurd, impossible to pronounce with great dignity—has been quietly registering its protest against its misapplication for as long as the school prize lists have been printing it. As Professor Reginald Quince-Hartley noted in his Essays on the Persistence of Etymology, “the sounds of words are not merely arbitrary signals; they carry the residue of the contexts in which they were formed, and sometimes that residue rises to the surface when the word is put to uses its original makers would not have sanctioned.”
The dux of any school is an excellent and diligent pupil. I do not dispute this. But she is not a leader in any sense that Julius Caesar would have recognised. She is a knower, a retainer, a faithful reproducer of what her teachers have taught her—admirable qualities all, and harder than they look, as those of us further down the form list are perhaps in a position to appreciate. But there is a word in the Latin vocabulary for that person, and it is not dux. It is discipulus—the one who has received instruction. That word also honks rather less. If the schools must reach for Latin, and I understand the impulse, perhaps they ought to reach a little further.
In the meantime, dux stands at the top of the prize list every July, honking gently and wondering how it came to be there, and I suspect the Romans, wherever they have gone, hear it and raise an eyebrow.
You are here: DUX