Book II.

WORDS TO CHOOSE

Chapter I.

A WORKING VOCABULARY

OTHER things being equal, it is obvious that the writer who has most words to choose from is most likely to find in his assortment just the word which he needs at a given moment. It is therefore worth while for a young writer to keep his ears open while conversation is going on about him, and his eyes open while he is reading, and to note and remember every word that is new to him in itself or in the meaning given to it. He may thus, while avoiding vulgarisms on the one hand and high-flown expressions on the other, enrich his diction from the racy speech of plain people and the best utterances of great authors, the two sources of what is most alive in language. If he is a student of other tongues, whether ancient or modern, he has at hand a third means of adding to his stock of English. "Translation," as Rufus Choate is reported to have said, "should be pursued to bring to mind and to employ all the words you already own, and to tax and torment invention and discovery and the very deepest memory for additional, rich, and admirably expressive words."

It would, of course, be absurd for a boy to have the desirableness of enlarging his vocabulary constantly on his mind; but if he avails himself of all his opportunities, in the school-room or out of it, he will be surprised to find how rapidly his vocabulary grows.

Overworked Words. A writer whose stock of words is small necessarily demands too much work from the few within reach. Another whose resources are larger, but who is too lazy to profit by them, overworks words that are at his tongue's end, and underworks others. Even a good writer may have favorite expressions which are constantly getting into his sentences, as King Charles the First's head kept getting into Mr. Dick's Memorial. Matthew Arnold, for example, at one time talked so persistently about "culture" as to make the word a public nuisance. Emerson had occasion, it is said, to thank a friend for pointing out a word which he had used too often for the comfort of his readers.

For young writers to escape this fault altogether is too much to expect; but they may, at least, have pet words of their own, in place of the stock phrases that are in everybody's mouth. They may give up calling everything that they like bully or nice or jolly, and everything that they dislike nasty or horrid or disgusting. Such words are to be avoided, not because they are objectionable in themselves, but because they take the place of more specific words, and because they have been used so often and for so many purposes by inexperienced writers that their virtue is gone out of them.

Chapter II.

BOOKISH OR LIVING WORDS

YOUNG writers sometimes introduce into their compositions words that they would not use in familiar conversation, words that have come to them, not from their own experience and observation, but from books. The language of books is, of course, to a very large extent drawn from the spoken language; but books are infested with words that have died out of the spoken language, or that have never been in it. The best authors in their best moments write like human beings, not like parrots or machines; but even they occasionally fall into what may be called the literary dialect.

Bookish words, bad enough in themselves, become far worse when used without a clear sense of their meaning. The prevalence of such words in a school or college composition is a pretty sure sign that the writer has nothing to say on the subject in hand, or that he lacks either the will or the power to take an interest in what he is writing. Regarding his composition as an irksome task, associating it with his work rather than with his play, he sends his memory in search of expressions which he has seen in books or heard in the school-room, instead of using those which he is accustomed to use with his fellows. The fault is not altogether his. It would be less common if teachers took pains to make English composition an agreeable and a stimulating exercise.