Bishop Brooks and R. L. Stevenson use the word busy-ness to denote a shade of meaning that business does not. Lowell somewhere coins the word proveable, because probable is inadequate to his purpose. The terminations in -ness, -less, and -ism are, perhaps, most drawn upon to make new words; also the use of words in changed part of speech, as, to umpire, a climb, a find, is frequent.

2. Other occasions, less real, are to be watched and subjected to the exactions of good taste, because the freedom of coinage easily passes into mannerism and license, developing a fondness for vagaries in language for the sake of smartness or humor or pungency. Humorous formations and compounds are an acknowledged license analogous to the freedom of conversational style; and like any word-play they are a rather cheap and ephemeral type of pleasantry.

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EXAMPLES. — 1. Of hasty or thoughtless coinage. "This, coupled with the fast-spreading gloom, and the wild tumblefication, and the fierce cracking of flapping noises, frightened her."1 The following is quoted from a sermon: You may seem to be drifting, oarless and helmless and anchorless and almost everything-else-less." This last example suggests how easy and how risky it is for a writer of imperfect culture to make coinages for an occasion; they may really impair the dignity of what he intends to convey, if he lacks the fine sense of congruity.

2. Humorous coinage. "Her spirits rose considerably on beholding these goodly preparations, and from the nothingness of good works she passed to the somethingness of ham and toast with great cheerfulness.” "Amidst the general hum of mirth and conversation that ensued, there was a little man with a puffy say-nothing-to-me-or-I'll-contradict-you sort of countenance, who remained very quiet."2

10. Employment of Archaic Vocabulary. In the general effort to secure fresh and unworn terms for literary use, there is a strong tendency at present to work the resources of the older and more native elements of the language, reviving terms and especially formations that were in complete or 1 W. CLARK RUSSELL, Jack's Courtship.

2 DICKENS, Pickwick Papers, Chap. vii.

partial desuetude, and utilizing thereby both their renewed life and their antique flavor. This tendency has both its wholesome and its untoward sides.

1. The wholesome side shows itself in the decided preference for the homely Saxon words, which has succeeded to the classical tendency of a century ago; also in the custom of using the native powers of the language for new forms and terminations. This is the revival of a power that during the period of Latin influence was in abeyance.

EXAMPLES. - The most prevalent ways in which the old powers of the language may be used are the following:

1. The widening of the sphere of the strong verb; as in shone (which has come in since 1700), clomb.

2. The free employment of an archaic pronominal adverb; as, thereto, thereunder, wherethrough, whereof; also of such words as albeit, howbeit.

3. The freedom of making the comparative in -er and the superlative in -est in the case of long words; as exalteder, insufferablest.

4. The use of the Saxon negative un- in widely enlarged application; as, unwisdom, unfaith.

Tennyson has been a great influence in this century in reviving the older elements of the language.

2. The untoward side is simply the excess that is apt to attend all good movements; ill-furnished writers may take the plea of homely Saxon and push it into a craze, an affectation. In religious language, also, there is a tendency to employ the archaic diction of the Bible so much as to impair genuine fervor and run into the "holy tone" and cant. No fashion in language, however good, can take the place of plain conviction and power.

EXAMPLES. - To interlard one's writing with such archaisms as hight, yclept, swain, wight, quoth, ye (for the), yt (for that), is simply word-play and humorous affectation; the fact that Charles Lamb could indulge his fancy for such quaintnesses does not create a case for imitators. The survival of the Biblical coloring is noticeable in old connectives and adverbs, such as perchance, peradventure, furthermore, verily, in sooth, haply,

words against which there is no objection except on the score of ungenuineness and affectation. It may be laid down as a rule that when a manner of speaking becomes a fad, a mannerism, it should be discarded.1

IV. SCHOLARLY USE.

While, as has been noted above,2 the reader must be recognized and worked for as a person of average culture, it is more than average culture that must be involved in what the writer brings him. By the very fact of his venturing to write, the writer sets up as a scholar, that is, as a model and authority in his subject, and, no less, as a standard in the way of presenting it. This has its application not only to invention but to choice of words as well; his work should evince a sound and refined estimate of his resources of language, individual skill of choice, and good taste.

II. Native and Added Elements of the Vocabulary. — In the primal duty to "be completely in touch with the English vocabulary," one of the first things is to know not merely the philological history, but more especially the feeling and savor of the different ground-elements of the language. For this general purpose these strata, or elements, may be regarded as two: the Saxon and Romanic, comprising the everyday words used by the Saxon pioneers and added to afterwards by the Norman conquerors; and the Latin, comprising the more learned words introduced since the Revival of Letters and the Reformation. Each of these elements has its place and its practical uses; the writer's duty is to employ each for what it is worth, and be not anxious, on the score of a mere vogue or wave of taste, to discard either.3

1 The affected use of any device of speech incurs the reproach of the third fault in art; see above, p. 6. — Poetic archaisms will come up for discussion later; see below, p. 144. 2 See above, p. 52.

8" Especially do not indulge any fantastic preference for either Latin or AngloSaxon, the two great wings on which our magnificent English soars and sings; we can spare neither. The combination gives us an affluence of synonymes and a deli

NOTE. It will be useful here to give a passage illustrating each source; one made up of words predominantly Saxon, the other freely using words of classical (Latin and Greek) origin.

I. In the first, from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the almost pure Saxon character is like the natural, unstudied, conversational language of common intercourse :

"Now they had not gone far, but a great mist and a darkness fell upon them all, so that they could scarce for a great while see the one the other. Wherefore they were forced for some time to feel for one another by words, for they walked not by sight. But any one must think that here was but sorry going for the best of them all, but how much worse for the women and children, who both of feet and heart were but tender. Yet so it was, that through the encouraging words of him that led in the front, and of him that brought them up behind, they made a pretty good shift to wag along. The way also was here very wearisome through dirt and slabbiness. Nor was there on all this ground so much as one inn or victualing-house, therein to refresh the feebler sort. Here therefore was grunting and puffing and sighing. While one tumbleth over a bush, another sticks fast in the dirt; and the children, some of them, lost their shoes in the mire. While one cries out, I am down; and another, Ho, where are you? and a third, The bushes have got such fast hold on me, I think I cannot get away from them."1

2. In the second, from De Quincey, while the body of the passage must still be Saxon, words of Latin and Greek origin are freely chosen for the sake of a more accurate discrimination in thought, and these give to the style, whether designedly or not, a certain formal and erudite flavor :

"Every process of Nature unfolds itself through a succession of phenomena. Now, if it be granted of the artist generally, that of all this moving series he can arrest as it were but so much as fills one instant of time, and with regard to the painter in particular, that even this insulated moment he can exhibit only under one single aspect or phasis, -it then becomes evident that, in the selection of this single instant and of this single aspect,

cacy of discrimination such as no unmixed idiom can show."- HIGGINSON, Atlantic Essays, p. 81.

"Racy Saxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermix readily with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in 'second intention.' In this late day certainly, no critical process can be conducted reasonably without eclecticism." - PATER, Appreciations, p. 13.

In Earle's English Prose, Chap. i, from which this classification is adapted, is a very valuable list of equivalent words from these different sources.

1 BUNYAN, Pilgrim's Progress, Pt. ii.

too much care cannot be taken that each shall be in the highest possible degree pregnant in its meaning; that is, shall yield the utmost range to the activities of the imagination." 1

What these two classes of words are good for, respectively, is deducible from the relative places they fill in the history of the language.

1. The Saxon or native element comprises, to begin with, all the words and forms that determine the framework of the language: its particles, its pronouns, its inflections, in general, its symbolic element. This element, and in almost equal degree the immediately superinduced Romanic, come from a pioneer age when men's thoughts were absorbed with plain matters of the home and the soil, of labor and warfare, of neighborhood and common traffic. It ranges, therefore, over the vocabulary of everyday life, wherein the work of the hand and ordinary activity and suffering are more concerned than the subtilties of the brain.

In the Saxon element, therefore, are to be found the terms that come closest to universal experience: words of the family and the home and the pain relations of life. They are, therefore, the natural terms for common intercourse, for simple and direct emotions, for strong and hearty sentiments. Saxon, with its short words and sturdy sounds, and by its very limitation to the large and rudimentary emotions, is especially the language of strength.3

2. The Latin, and in later years the Greek element, came in as men began to study and discriminate, came in as scholarship and literature claimed men's interests. By advancing and refining thought, therefore, a want was created for new terms; the vocabulary must be enlarged in the direction of greater discrimination, particularization, precision. Delicacies and

1 DE QUINCEY, Essay on Lessing, Works (Riverside edition), Vol. ix, p. 390.

2 For the symbolic and presentive elements, see below, p. 117.

3 For the relation of such words to force, see above, p. 34.