HAIL, KINSPRIT!
The keenest pleasure in life, of course, is to find a Kindred Spirit—one whose mind glows and teeters with delight at the same queer things that rouse us to excitement. We have just found one, and yet we shall never know him, except by his address, which is Y. 1926, the Times, E. C. 4, London. For we are much too busy to write to any one, even to a Kindred Spirit.
We will tell you why we feel sure he is a Kindred Spirit; but in parenthesis, it was Mr. Pearsall Smith who lamented the fact that the English language contains no satisfactory word for “a person who is enthusiastic about the same things that you are enthusiastic about.” It is too grossly clumsy to say fellow-fan or co-enthusiast; so Mr. Smith, a philologist of charming finesse (have you read his little book The English Language published by Henry Holt?) boldly proposed to fill the vacancy by coining the word milver. This, he said, would be useful to poets, since there is no rhyme in English for silver.
The word milver, alas, leaves us cool, in spite of its usefulness as a rhyme. It does not strike down in the great subsoil of the language—the dark deep skein of inherited word-roots from which our present meanings blossom and put forth. We suggest—without much thought—a mere contraction. How would kinsprit do? We rather like the look of it; it has a droll, benign, elvish appearance as we put it down. A couplet occurs to us—
They pledged their bond with joyful oath—
A kinsprit passion knit them both.
That shows you it could be used as an adjective as well. Come, now, if we all pull together very likely we can get Messrs. Merriam to put it in the next edition of Webster:
Kinsprit, n and a. (orig. obscure: perh. contracted from kin[dred] sprit[e])—A fellow-enthusiast, one impassioned with the same zeal or hobby or enthusiasm.
The reason why we know that Y. 1926 is a kinsprit is in the following notice in the Personal column of the London Times:
Lost in Taxi last week, SMALL PORTFOLIO containing colour diagrams and newspaper print of Lamb’s portrait of Lytton Strachey. Finder rewarded. Y. 1926, The Times, E. C. 4.