Joseph M. Bachelor

“ I believe it is impossible to express, to the life, what the ecstasies and transports of the soul are when it is so saved, as I may say, out of the very grave: and I do not wonder now at that custom, when a malefactor, who has the halter about his neck, is tied up, and just going to be turned off, and has a reprieve brought to him—I say, I do not wonder that they bring a surgeon with it, to let him blood that very moment they tell him of it, that the surprise may not drive the animal spirits from the heart, and overwhelm him. ”

“ There is, however, a circumstance attending these Colonies which, in my opinion, fully counterbalances this difference, and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the northward. It is that in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. ”

“ Power over words, like power of any other sort, is for use, not abuse. That it sometimes is abused must not mislead us into thinking that it should in itself be scorned or neglected.
Our contempt and distrust do not mean that our fundamental ideas about language are unsound. Beneath our wholesome dislike for shallow facility and insincerity of speech, we have a conviction that the mastery of words is a good thing, not a bad. We are therefore unwilling to take the vow of linguistic poverty. If we lack the ability to bend words to our use, it is from laziness, not from scruple. ”

“ Further, you will perceive the poetry of words. Thus to wheedle is to wag the tail and to patter is to hurry through one's prayers (paternoster) . What a picture of the frailty of men even in their holiness flashes on us from that word patter! Breakfast is the breaking of the fast of the night. Routine (the most humdrum of words) is travel along a way already broken. Goodby is an abridged form of "God be with you." Dilapidated is fallen stone from stone. ”

“ But the majority of speakers and writers pay more heed to rough general substance than to separate instruments and items. Hence we have thought best to begin where most work is going on already—with words in combination.
As you turn from the groups to the individuals, you must understand that your labors will be onerous and detailed. You must not assume that by nature all words are much alike, any more than you assume that all men are much alike. Of course the similarities are many and striking, and the fundamental fact is that a word is a word as a man is a man. ”

“ Again, glibness of speech sometimes awakens our distrust. We like actions rather than words; we prefer that character, personality, and kindly feelings should be their own mouthpiece. So be it. But there are thoughts and emotions properly to be shared with other people, yet incapable of being revealed except through language. It is only when language is insincere—when it expresses lofty sentiments or generous sympathies, yet springs from designing selfishness—that it justly arouses misgivings. ”

“ To humble is to lower in dignity or self-esteem, or as used reflexively, to restrain one's own pride; the word often implies that the person has been over-proud or arrogant. To humiliate is to deprive of self-esteem or to bring into ignominy. To disgrace is to bring actual shame upon. ”

“ Mother, the flag—what sooner than an insult coupled with these terms will rouse a man to fight? But does that man kiss his mother, or salute the flag, or pay much heed to either? Probably not. Words not realities? With what realities must we more carefully reckon? Words are as dangerous as dynamite, as beneficent as brotherhood. An unfortunate word may mean a plea rejected, an enterprise baffled, half the world plunged into war. A fortunate word may open a triple-barred door, avert a disaster, bring thousands of people from jealousy and hatred into coöperation and goodwill. ”

“ By EDMUND BURKE
In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole; and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth, and this from a great variety of powerful causes ”

“ Any editorial office force can insert missing commas and semicolons, and iron out blunders in the English; but it has not the time, if indeed the ability, to instil life into a lifeless manuscript. A living style is rarer than an inoffensive one, and the road of literary ambition is strewn with failures due to "correctness."
Cultivate readiness, even daring, of utterance. A single turn of expression may be so audacious that it plucks an idea from its shroud or places within us an emotion still quivering and warm. Sustained discourse may unflaggingly clarify or animate. ”

“ Some marry at their own social level, some above them, some beneath; some go down in childless bachelorhood or leave an unkempt and illegitimate progeny. And if you trace their own lineage, you will find for some that it is but decent and middle-class, for some that it is mongrelized and miscegenetic, for some that it is proud, ancient, yea perhaps patriarchal.
It is contrary to nature for a word, as for a man, to live the life of a hermit. Through external compulsion or internal characteristics a word has contacts with its fellows. ”

“ In fine, with its growing powers and experience, it abandons its old conception that all persons are practically alike, and follows human nature through the countless ramifications of man's status, temperament, activities, or fate. And it augments its vocabulary to keep pace, roughly at least, with its expanding ideas. In thought and terminology alike its growth is from genus to species.
So it is with all our ideas and with all our words to cap them. We radiate from an ascertained center into new areas of knowledge ”

“ In Chapter VIII you were given lists of synonyms and made the distinctions yourself. Near the close of Chapter VIII you were given words and discovered for yourself what their synonyms are. This third stage might seem to reveal to you the full joys and benefits of your researches in this subject. Certainly to find a new word for an old one is an exhilarating sort of mental travel. And to find a new word which expresses exactly what an old one expressed but approximately is a real acquisition in living. But you are not yet a perfectly trained hunter of synonyms. ”

“ In the second place, are we to develop a vocabulary for oral discourse or a vocabulary for writing? It may be that our chief impediment or our chief ambition lies in one field rather than in the other. Nevertheless we should strive for a double mastery; we ought to speak well and write well. Indeed the two powers so react upon each other that we ought to cultivate both for the sake of either. True, some men, though inexpert as writers, have made themselves proficient as speakers; or though shambling and ineffective as speakers, have made themselves proficient as writers. ”

“ To know it intimately and thoroughly, to be on entirely free terms with it, to depend upon it just so far as dependence is safe, to have a sure understanding of what it can do and what it cannot, you must arduously cultivate it. Words, like people, yield themselves to the worthy. They hunger for friendship—and lack the last barrier of reserve which hedges all human communion. ”

“ This may seem a hard saying to those who seek, or would impart, mere glibness of phrase without regard for the substance—who worship "words, words, words" without thought of "the matter." There is such a thing as froth of utterance, but who has respect therefor or is deceived thereby? Speech that is not informed is like a house without a foundation. You should not desire to possess it. Abroad in this world of ours already are too many people who darken counsel by words without knowledge. ”

“ Out of such stereotyped utterance only the general idea emerges. The precise meaning is lazily or incompetently left to the hearer to imagine. The precise meaning? There is none. A person who does not take the trouble to speak clearly has not taken the trouble to think clearly.
But the master of synonyms expresses, instead of general, hazy, commonplace conceptions, the subtlest shadings of thought and feeling. He has so trained himself that he selects, it may be unconsciously, from a throng of possible words. One word may be strong, another weak. One may be broad, another narrow. ”

“ And what revelations as into a mystic fraternalism with words do you obtain when you confront such a phrase as "the bank teller" or "cut to the quick"!
Not only have words become more like living beings to you; you have learned to think of them in relations analogous to the human. You can detect the blood kinship, for example, between prescribe and manuscript, and know that the strain of fact or fie or fy in a word is pretty sure to betoken making or doing. You know that there are elaborate intermarriages among words. ”

“ AS MEMBERS OF VERBAL FAMILIES Our investigation into the nature, qualities, and fortunes of single words must now merge into a study of their family connections. We do not go far into this new phase of our researches before we perceive that the career of a word may be very complicated. Most people, if you asked them, would tell you that an individual word is a causeless entity—a thing that was never begotten and lacks power to propagate. ”

“ You have discovered, further, that the language actually swarms with "pairs"—words joined with each other not in blood or by marriage but through meaning. You have so familiarized yourself with hundreds of these pairs that to think of one word is to call the other to mind.
Finally, and in many respects most important of all, you have acquired a vast stock of synonyms. You have had it brought to your attention that the number of basic ideas in the world is surprisingly small; that for each of these ideas there is in our language one generic word ”

“ You interview a potential investor; does he accept your proposition or not? A prospective customer walks into your store; does he buy the goods you show him? You enter the drawing room of one of the elite; are you invited again and again? Your words will largely decide—your words, or your verbal abstinence. For be it remembered that words no more than dollars are to be scattered broadcast for the sole reason that you have them. The right word should be used at the right time—and at that time only. Silence is oftentimes golden. ”

“ The ideas here are varied, even contradictory, enough; yet good may be used of every one of them. Good is in truth so general a term that we must know the attendant circumstances if we are to attach to it a signification even approximately accurate. This does not at all imply that good is a term we may brand as useless. It implies merely that when our meaning is specific we must set good aside (unless circumstances make its sense unmistakable) in favor of a specific word. ”

“ Though we are to recognize the advantage of working in the undress of speech rather than in stiffly-laundered literary linens, though we are not to despise the accessions of strength and of charm which we may obtain from the homely and familiar, we must never be careless. The man whose speech is slovenly is like the man who chews gum—unblushingly commonplace.
We must struggle to maintain our individuality. We must not be a mere copy of everybody else. We must put into our words the cordiality we put into our daily demeanor. ”

“ All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the Northern Provinces, where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not composing most probably the tenth of the people. ”

“ A second class of words is made up of those you speak on occasions either special or formal—occasions when you are trying, perhaps not to show off, but at least to put your best linguistic foot foremost. Some of them have a meaning you are not quite sure of; some of them seem too ostentatious for workaday purposes; some of them you might have been using but somehow have not. Words of this class are not your bosom friends. They are your speaking acquaintance, or perhaps a little better than that. You must convert them into friends, into prompt and staunch supporters in time of need. ”

“ A generation or so ago human beings were content to spend the full term of their earthly existence amid rural surroundings, or if in their declining days they longed for more of the comforts and associations which are among the cravings of mortality, it was an easy proposition to move to the nearest village or, if they were too high and mighty for this simple measure to satisfy them, they could indulge in the more grandiose performance of residing in the county seat. ”

“ The fact that English is a double-barreled language, and that of parallel terms one is likely to be native and the other classic, is interesting in itself. Our lists of parallels, however, though (with the exception of List B) they are arranged to bring out this duality of origin, have other and more vital uses as material for exercises. For after all it matters little whether we know where a word comes from, provided we know thoroughly the meaning and implications of the word itself. The lists already given and those to follow show the more important words actually yoked as parallels. ”

“ Moreover experience has shown that the various successful methods of bringing words under man's sway are not mutually antagonistic but may be practiced simultaneously, just as health is promoted, not by attending to diet one year, to exercise the next, and to mental attitude the third, but by bestowing wise and fairly constant attention on all. Yet it would be absurd to state that all methods of increasing one's vocabulary, or of attaining vigor of physique, are equally valuable. ”

“ You must also see them and study them in action, not only as they are employed in good books and by careful speakers, but likewise as they fall from the lips of unconventional speakers who through them secure vivid and telling effects. In brief, you must learn word nature, as you learn human nature, from a variety of sources.
Now in ordinary speech most of us use words, not as individual things, but as parts of a whole—as cogs in the machine of utterance by which we convey our thoughts and feelings. ”

“ Unless, therefore, you wish your intellectual processes to be as hazy and haphazard as those of mental shirkers and loafers, you must eschew, not necessarily all slang, but all heedless, all habitual use of it. Now and then a touch of slang, judiciously chosen, is effective; now and then it fulfils a legitimate purpose of language. But normally you should express yourself as befits one who has at his disposal the rich treasuries of the dictionary instead of a mere stock of greasy counterfeit phrases. ”

“ To adopt any of the methods designated would be like resolving to invest in city lots and then buying properties as you encountered them, with no regard for expenditure, for value in general, or for special serviceability to you. Surely such procedure would be unbusinesslike. If you pay out good money, you meditate well whether that which you receive for it shall compensate you. Likewise if you devote time and effort to gaining ownership of words, you should exercise foresight in determining whether they will yield you commensurate returns. ”

“ A good baseball player, for instance, tirelessly studies both the minutiae of his technique (as how to hold a bat, how to stand at the plate) and the big combinations and possibilities of the game. A good musician keeps unremitting command over every possible touch of each key and at the same time seeks sweeping mastery over vast and complex harmonies. So we, if we would have the obedience of our vocabularies, dare not lag into desultory attention to either words when disjoined or words as potentially combined into the larger units of thought and feeling. ”

“ The words rush out and at one stride comes convert the stars and the darkness into vast beings or at least vast personal forces; the comparisons are so natural as to seem inevitable; we are transported to the very scene and feel the overwhelming abruptness of the nightfall. But if a figure of speech seems artificial, if it is strained or far-fetched or merely decorative, it subtracts from the effectiveness of the passage. ”

“ You must step aside from your way for the sake of a new acquaintance; in conversations, in sermons, in addresses, in letters, in journalistic columns, in standard literature you must grasp the stranger by the hand and look him straight in the eye. ”

“ All of us, at times anyhow, get out of as much work as we can. We even use the word work and its synonyms loosely and indolently. Perhaps this is a literary aspect of the labor problem. If, however, we can shake off our sluggishness and exert ourselves in discriminating our terms, we shall use work as a general word for effort, physical or mental, to some purposive end; labor for hard, physical work ”

“ You have taken due cognizance of the fact that words must be considered in the aggregate as well as individually, and have reckoned with the pitfalls and dangers as well as with the advantages of their use in combination. But the basis of everything is a keener knowledge of words severally. You have therefore come to study words with the zest and insight you exhibit (or should exhibit) in studying men. Incidentally, you have acquired the habit of looking up dictionary definitions, not merely to satisfy a present need, but also to add permanently to your linguistic resources. ”

“ Even apart from reading old literature and from having, when you use words, no ghosts of their pristine selves rise up to damn you, you may profit from a knowledge of how the meaning of a term has evolved. ”