The young journalist cannot be urged too strongly to study the use of words. Every word in the language has its correct use; a vast number are used incorrectly. You will find it a most interesting study. If you doubt its interest, be so good as to open your dictionary to any haphazard page and read intently for fifteen minutes. You will find words the existence of which you had not known, the meanings of which you had not understood. Observe the derivation and the primary meaning of the word and you cannot miss the proper use. You cannot put time to better purpose, if you seek for excellence in English composition, than by studying the English dictionary a few minutes every day.
When a writer is sure of his information, is sincere in his attitude, and is eager and enthusiastic for its presentation, the words and the sentences usually come to him with ease. It is when he is shaky over his facts, or insincere, or dishonest, that his words become feeble, and lack convincing quality, do not ring true. It is curious how often dishonest journalism convicts itself through timidity of diction.
The English language is reaching afar. Those there are who predict that eventually it will be spoken everywhere. Already it is the language of more than two hundred million persons. It will carry the tourist all over the globe by the established routes of travel,—through the streets of Japan, and the bazars of India, and the South Sea islands of the Pacific. Tennyson said to Sir Edwin Arnold: “It is bad for us that English will always be a spoken speech, since that means that it will always be changing and so the time will come when you and I will be as hard to read as Chaucer is to-day.”
Indeed, the English language is changing constantly. We are eliding letters, lopping off terminations, cutting out phrases and abolishing circumlocution. It is not so old a language as a score of others and every opportunity for improvement exists. It is, indeed, “an improvable language.”
Compare, if you please, any modern narrative with the beginning of Chaucer’s “The Tale of Melibeus”:
A young man called Melibeus, mighty and riche, begat upon his wif, that called was Prudens, a doughter which that called was Sophie. Upon a day byfel, that for his disport he is went into the fields him to play. His wif and his doughter eek hath he laft in-with his hous, of which the dores were fast shut. Thre of his olde foos have it espyed, and setten laddres to the walles of his hous, and by the wyndowes be entred, and beetyn his wyf, and woundid his doughter with fyve mortal woundes in fyve sondry places, that is to sayn, in her feet, in her hondes, in her eeres, in her nose, and in her mouth; and lafte her for deed, and went away.
Or imagine if you can to what small space a modern newspaper copy reader would reduce the following bit of Washington Irving prose that was printed in school readers sixty years ago as an example of graceful writing and felicity of expression:
In one of those somber and rather melancholy days in the latter part of autumn when the shadows of morning and evening almost mingle together and throw a gloom over the decline of the year I passed several hours rambling around Westminster Abbey. There was something congenial to the season in the mournful magnificence of the old pile; and, as I passed its threshhold, it seemed like stepping back into the regions of antiquity and losing myself among the shades of former ages.
Usage is amplifying the service of many words whose primary meaning is obvious from their Latin derivation. Dexter is the Latin word meaning the right hand, and strictly speaking “dextrous movements” should mean right hand movements. But usage has brought dexterity to mean readiness, skill, adroitness, aptitude, both physical or mental. Macaulay uses it constantly in all of these meanings. “Manufacture” is easily traced to the Latin origin manus, the hand, and facio, to make—to make by hand. But we have come to use “manufacture” for the making of anything, by machinery, or chemical processes, or in any way other than with the hand. And who shall say that these usages, these enlargements of the meaning of dexterity and manufacture, have not improved the English language?
More than ever before is there present-day need for the use of plain, understandable English. We live in a money-making age—an age of industrial development, in which machines are doing the work that brains used to do, in which vocational and technical education are demanded of our schools and colleges, and in which the cry for technical literature is insistent. Experts only understand the technical words and the language of their specialty, hence the cry for writers who can translate technical language into plain English that any reader may understand. Dean West, of Princeton, has deplored the inability of many professors to teach orally or in writing in any other language than the dialect of their specialties. Lacking in literary training they are unable clearly to say what they think.