A history of the English Language

143.
Aureate Terms.
The introduction of unusual words from Latin (and occasionally elsewhere) became a 
conscious stylistic device in the fifteenth century, extensively used by poets and 
occasionally by writers of prose. By means of such words as 
abusion, dispone, diurne, 
equipolent, palestral,
and 
tenebrous,
poets attempted what has been described as a kind 
of stylistic gilding, and this feature of their language is accordingly known as “aureate 
diction.”
28
The beginnings of this tendency have been traced back to the fourteenth 
century. It occurs in moderation in the poetry of Chaucer, becomes a distinct mannerism 
in the work of Lydgate, and runs riot in the productions of the Scottish Chaucerians—
James I, Henryson, Dunbar, and the rest. How
28 
The standard treatment of the subject is John C.Mendenhall, 
Aureate Terms 
(Lancaster, PA, 
1919). 
A history of the english language 172

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far this affectation went may be seen in the opening lines of Dunbar’s 
Ballad of Our 
Lady:
Hale, sterne superne! Hale, in eterne, 
In Godis sicht to schyne! 
Lucerne in derne,
29
for to discerne
Be glory and grace devyne; 
Hodiern, modern, sempitern,
Angelicallregyne! 
Our tern
30
infern for to dispern
Helpe, rialest Rosyne!
31
The use of such “halff chongyd Latyne,” as a contemporary poet describes it,
32
was quite 
artificial. The poets who affected aureate terms have been described as tearing up words 
from Latin “which never took root in the language, like children making a mock garden 
with flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither.”
33
This is 
essentially true, but not wholly so. The novelty that was sought after, and that such words 
had in the beginning, wore off with use; and words which were “aureate” in Chaucer, like 
laureate, mediation, oriental, prolixity,
have sometimes become part of the common 
speech. These innovations are of considerable interest in the history of style; in the 
history of language they appear as a minor current in the stream of Latin words flowing 
into English in the course of the Middle Ages.