1. Put down a group of five words having similar meanings. Explain the differences among them.
2. Choose any word. Give its exact opposite.
3. From any short paragraph copy all the nouns. In a parallel column put opposites or contrasts.
4. Do the same for the adjectives, verbs, and adverbs.
5. Write down all the common nouns which correspond to a man, a girl, a leader, a house, a costume, a crime.
Composition of the English Language. Turning now from the means of improving the speaker's language equipment let us pass to some remarks upon his use of words. The English language is the largest, the most varied in the universe. Almost entirely free from difficulties of inflection and conjugation, with a simplified grammar, and a great freedom of construction, it suffers from only two signal drawbacks—its spelling and its pronunciation. While it has preserved to a great degree its original Anglo-Saxon grammar, it has enriched its vocabulary by borrowings from everywhere. Its words have no distinctive forms, so every foreign word can usually be naturalized by a mere change of sound. No matter what their origin, all belong to one family now; gnu is as much English as knew, japan as pogrom, fête as papoose, batik as radii, ohm as marconigram, macadamized as zoomed. Most of the modern borrowings—as just illustrated—were to serve for new things or ideas. But there was one time when a great reduplication of the vocabulary occurred. After the French conquered England in 1066, English and Norman-French were spoken side by side. The resultant tongue, composed of both, offered many doubles for the same idea. In some instances the fashionable and aristocratic French word marked a difference of meaning as is clearly indicated by such pairs as beef and ox, veal and calf, mutton and sheep, pork and pig. In many other cases words of French and English origin are separated by differences less distinct. Such are love and affection, worship and adoration. A speaker must take thought of such groups, and consciously endeavor to use the more appropriate for his purpose.
Anglo-Saxon and Romance. It may help him to remember that the Anglo-Saxon words are the more homely, the closer to our everyday feelings and experiences, the expression of our deepest ideas and sentiments, the natural outspoken response to keen emotion. On the other hand, the Romance words—as they are called, whether from the French or directly from the Latin—are likely to be longer; they belong generally to the more complicated relationships of society and government; they are more intellectual in the sense that they represent the operations of the brain rather than the impulses of the heart. They deal with more highly trained wills, with more abstruse problems; they reason, they argue, they consider; they are philosophical, scientific, legal, historical. Listen to a soldier relate his war experiences. What will his vocabulary be? Listen to a diplomat explaining the League of Nations. What will his vocabulary be? Have you ever heard a speaker who gave you the impression that all his words ended in tion? This was because his vocabulary was largely Romance.
The inferences from the foregoing are perfectly plain. Subject and audience will determine to a large extent what kinds of words a speaker will choose. The well-equipped speaker will be master of both kinds; he will draw from either as occasion offers. He will not insult one audience by talking below their intelligence, nor will he bore another by speaking over their heads.
General and Specific Terms. Effective speaking depends to a large extent upon the inclusion of specific terms as contrasted with general terms. "Glittering generalities" never make people listen. They mean nothing because they say too much. Study the following selections to see how the concrete phraseology used makes the material more telling, how it enforces the meaning. Pick out the best expressions and explain why they are better than more general terms. In the first, note how the last sentence drives home the meaning of the first two. Listeners may understand the first two, they remember the last.
Civil and religious liberty in this country can be preserved only through the agency of our political institutions. But those institutions alone will not suffice. It is not the ship so much as the skilful sailing that assures the prosperous voyage.