CHAPTER X
THE MASTERY OF A WRITING VOCABULARY
Ideas without Words.—It is possible to have ideas without having words in which to express them. Miss Helen Keller[35] had plenty of ideas before any one taught her the words for them. The painter trains himself to express ideas in paint; the sculptor, in stone. The inventor expresses ideas in machinery. Because words however are the commonest means of expression, it is desirable that one should know as many as possible. A person who has ideas will indeed be able to communicate them in some rough-and-ready form of speech; will use a poor word, if he cannot think of a good one, and by hook or crook will manage to be understood. But an unread, untrained man trying to communicate some fine shade of thought is commonly a sorry sight, no matter how bright his mind may be.
Words without Ideas.—On the other hand, it is possible to know words without knowing what they stand for. Some persons of quick verbal memory pick up phrases readily, and utter them glibly, with little sense of their meaning. Gratiano, of Shakespeare’s drama, “spoke an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in Venice.” Such persons as he have given ground for the sarcastic remark that language is the art of concealing thought. The use of meaningless phrases, and the use of words without a care to their exact meaning, is one danger that besets the student of composition. The boy who fluently remarks that he recently lost his little saturnine (meaning canine, i.e. dog); the lady, Mrs. Malaprop, who walks through Sheridan’s play, saying, “You go first, and we’ll precede you”; the man, Launcelot Gobbo, who enlivens The Merchant of Venice with such remarks as that “his suit is impertinent to himself,”—these people need a book of synonyms. Unless a writer is sure that he knows definitely the meaning of the word that his pen is about to trace, he would much better stay his hand.
Ideas and Words.—Though one mind may have ideas but lack their names, and though another may have the names but lack the notions for which they stand, yet both ideas and words are indispensable to the writer. A general recipe for getting ideas is hardly easier to give than a recipe for being great, or for having blue eyes, or for being liked by every one. Ideas are had through new experiences, new acquaintanceships, new sights; through hard thinking, through hard reading,—in short, through living. Mr. Henry James, the eminent novelist, gives a direction for being a good novelist: Try to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost. The student who is eager to know as much as possible of what is worth knowing in life, and is devoured with curiosity to learn the name of everything, is sure to acquire both new ideas and new words.[36]
It is nevertheless not to be denied that to some extent ideas can be bred by the study of the mere words. How true this is appears when it is remembered that words are the embalmed ideas of men. A study of such a list as the Curious Words given in the preceding chapter cannot but add to the student’s mental stores. Thackeray, it is said, used to read the dictionary before he composed. It may be presumed that the habit used not merely to acquaint him with new words, but to arouse his mind and set it to fashioning new thoughts. The attempt to discriminate between words that mean nearly, not quite, the same thing, results in a distinct gain in thought, and in power of thought. It is probable that no two words have exactly the same sense; to discover the difference enriches the discoverer’s store of knowledge, and develops one of the highest mental powers. A command of words not merely affords relief from the pain of dumbness, not merely loosens the tongue; it aids reasoning. Thinking proceeds more securely the moment a hazy notion is given definite shape in the right word. Indeed, the mere search for the right word is always a means of clearing up the thought. To be tortured in mind by inability to find the unique phrase, sometimes means a mere fault in verbal memory; as often, or oftener, it is due to a vagueness of thinking.
By way of summary, then, acquisition of ideas furthers acquisition of words, and vice versâ. To be poor in ideas, or to be poor in language,—either means failure for a writer.
The Two Vocabularies.—Of all the 200,000 words in our language, probably no one man would understand one-half if he saw them, undefined, in a dictionary. Just how large a man’s reading vocabulary can be is not known. Professor Holden, the astronomer, found that his own was about 33,000 words. It is therefore likely that 25,000 is not an unusual number for an educated person to understand. But the reading or passive vocabulary is very different in size from the writing or active vocabulary. To remember the sense of a word when it is seen is far less difficult than to recall the word whenever its meaning rises dimly in the mind. A little child has but one set of words—an active vocabulary; it makes oral use of all the expressions it knows. But the older person reads so much that he comes to recognize myriads of words that rarely rise to his lips or find their way to his pen. There is inevitably therefore a widening gap between the expressions he can recognize and those he can employ. That this should be so is in part desirable. A person of fourteen or sixteen or eighteen must, if he reads carefully, learn to understand many expressions that are too bookish for his own uses. The word temerarious, for instance, is needed once where its unpretentious cousin, rash, is needed a score of times. With some words the young writer needs only a speaking acquaintance; others are good friends that, in Hamlet’s phrase, he should buckle to his soul with hoops of steel. But it is safe to say that if a person can transfer some part of his reading vocabulary into his writing vocabulary, he will be much benefited by so doing. There is probably no reason why a freshman should not enter college master of a writing vocabulary of 5000 words, and a reading vocabulary of 15,000. Shakespeare’s works contain about 15,000 different words, the King James version of the Bible fewer than 6000. Again, each person uses the same words with many different meanings. Every great writer employs the same words in many figurative senses; the fact is perhaps the most striking proof of his literary power. If Shakespeare’s vocabulary were reckoned as including these figurative meanings, it would shoot up to a wonderful figure.
“It would be absurd,” says Professor A. S. Hill, with characteristic good sense, “for a boy to have the desirableness of enlarging his vocabulary constantly on his mind; but if he avails himself of his opportunities, in the school-room or out of it, he will be surprised to find how rapidly his vocabulary grows.” Doubtless however the matter must receive some definite attention, if the best results are to be secured. In the rest of this chapter particular methods of acquiring new words and senses of words will be considered.
A Vocabulary Book.—It will be found helpful to buy a strong blank-book of convenient size, and to copy into this every new word that seems to the student available for his writing; not every new word he meets, for some will impress him as too bookish or pedantic, but those which appear to express happily some idea that has lain unnamed in his mind.
Figurative Uses of Common Words.—A writer owes it to himself and to the reader to get all the service he legitimately can out of common words, because in the end so doing spares both persons a vast deal of unnecessary labor. Examine a handful of the well-worn counters of speech,—such words as poor, heavy, thin, best, full, manner, sense, deep, sweet. They are like dull pebbles brought home from the beach. But dip them back into the brine of a good book, and they become gems. The words specified above appear in a paragraph of Mr. W. D. Howells: “I followed Irving, too, in my later reading, but at haphazard, and with other authors at the same time. I did my poor best to be amused by his Knickerbocker History of New York, because my father liked it so much, but secretly I found it heavy; and a few years ago when I went carefully through it again, I could not laugh. Even as a boy I found some other things of his up-hill work. There was the beautiful manner, but the thought seemed thin; and I do not remember having been much amused by Bracebridge Hall, though I read it devoutly, and with a full sense that it would be very comme il faut to like it. But I did like the life of Goldsmith; I liked it a great deal better than the more authoritative life by Forster, and I think there is a deeper and sweeter sense of Goldsmith in it.”[37]