'Hateful', 'Awful', 'Dreadful'

I was casting about in my mind the other day for a good translation of the German 'gehässig', when the English 'hateful' occurred to me. The obvious objection was that while the German word is used to qualify a person who feels hatred himself, the English word qualifies a person who causes others to feel hatred.

'Hateful' differs from most English words formed in the same way. 'Beautiful' means 'full of beauty', 'graceful', 'full of grace', but it is not the person full of hate who is described as 'hateful'.

Perhaps it relieves us of our sense of guilt in expressing hatred if we project our feeling into the hated person. It is more comfortable to hate one who is full of hatred himself.

Analogies for this use of words can be found in other languages. The Latin 'amorosus' could almost be translated 'full of love' and 'formosus', 'full of beauty', but 'odiosus' means not 'full of hate' but 'hateful'. The French 'odieux' contains the same projection but the word is merely derived from the Latin. The projection appears again however in 'haineux'—the original of the English 'heinous'.

To return to English. I wrote down a list of all the words I could think of that were made on the same model. Obviously such a list cannot pretend to be complete, but excluding words like 'unfaithful' and 'distasteful', which are made from others by the mere addition of a negative prefix, I found that I could think of eighty-seven, a number which I felt sufficient for my purpose.

The meaning of the great majority was what one would expect from the analogy of 'beautiful'. Typical examples are 'powerful' and 'thoughtful'. In one or two cases there is, or may be, a shift of meaning; for example, we can say that a piece of work is skilful when we mean that the man who did it showed skill. This shift, however, is not common and in the few cases where I found it it appeared to be, as it were, reversible; there was no difficulty in using the word in its natural sense also. The man who does a