Technical and Bookish Words. Like words that are used by a small region are words which are understood by a clique of persons. Scholars are inclined to use a scholarly vocabulary. The biologist has one; the chemist another; the philosopher a third. This technical vocabulary may be a necessity at times; but when a specialist addresses the public, his words must be the words which an average cultured man can understand. Such words can be found if the writer will look for them; if he does not, his work can scarcely be called literature. Technical words and bookish terms are not words of national use.
The following by Josiah Royce illustrates how clearly a most abstruse topic can be handled by a man willing to take the trouble:[50]—
“If you ask what sort of thing this substance is, the first answer is, that it is something eternal; and that means, not that it lasts a good while, but that no possible temporal view of it could exhaust its nature. All things that happen result from the one substance. This surely means that what happens now and what happened millions of years ago are, for the substance, equally present and necessary results. To illustrate [243] once more in my own way: A spider creeping back and forth across a circle could, if she were geometrically disposed, measure out in temporal succession first this diameter, and then that. Crawling first over one diameter, she would say, ‘I now find this so long.’ Afterwards examining another diameter, she would say, ‘It has now happened that what I have just measured proves to be precisely as long as what I measured some time since, and no longer.’ The toil of such a spider might last many hours, and be full of such successive measurements, each marked by a spun thread of web. But the true circle itself within which the web was spun, the circle in actual space as the geometer knows it, would its nature be thus a series of events, a mere succession of spun threads? No, the true circle would be timeless, a truth founded in the nature of space, outlasting, preceding, determining all the weary web-spinning of this time-worn spider. Even so we, spinning our web of experience in all its dreary complications in the midst of the eternal nature of the world-embracing substance, imagine that our lives somehow contain true novelty, discover for the substance what it never knew before, invent new forms of being. We fancy our past wholly past, and our future wholly unmade. We think that where we have yet spun no web, there is nothing, and that what we long ago spun has vanished, broken by the winds of time into nothingness. It is not so. For the eternal substance there is no before and after; all truth is truth. ‘Far and forgot to me is near,’ it says. In the unvarying precision of its mathematical universe, all is eternally written.
‘Not all your piety nor wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out one word of it.’”
‘Not all your piety nor wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out one word of it.’”
Foreign Words. Words and phrases from a foreign language should be used only as a last resort. Bon mot, sine qua non, and dolce far niente are all very apt, and to a person like Mr. Lowell, who was intimately [244] acquainted with many languages, they may come as soon as their English equivalents. In the case of such a person, the reason why they should not be used is that the reader cannot understand them. But when a young smatterer uses them to advertise his calling acquaintance with a language, he is but proclaiming his own lack of good taste. In his composition they are as ineffective to make it respectable as a large diamond on a gamester’s finger to make him an honored gentleman. Use the English language when writing for English-speaking people. It has the fullest, richest vocabulary in the world. It will not be found unequal to the task of expressing your thoughts.
Words in Present Use. Third, words should be in present use. Words may be so new that people do not know them; they may have passed out of use after years of good service. Of new words, but little can be said. The language constantly changes. New discoveries and inventions demand new words. What ones will be more than temporary cannot be prophesied. “Blizzard” and “mugwump” were new but a short time ago: the latter is dying from disuse, the former has come to stay. In this uncertainty one thing can be said, however. No word which has not secured recognition should be used by a young person, if by reputable words already in the language he can express his meaning. And just as he should not be the first to take up an untried word, so the young writer should not be the last to drop a dead one. There is at present a sort of fad for old English. A large number of words that have been resting quietly in their graves for centuries have been called forth. Some may enjoy a second life; most of them will feel only the weakness of a second obsolescence. “Foreword” and “inwit” were good once; but “preface” and “conscience” [245] mean as much and have the advantage of being alive. To be understood use the words of the present.
Words in their Present Meaning. Use words in their present signification. Not only has language cast out many words; it has changed many others so that they are hardly recognized. When Chaucer wrote,
“Ther may no man Mercury mortify
But hit be with his brother knowleching,”
“mortify” meant to make dead, to kill. To-day a lady may say she was mortified to death; but that is hyperbole. In “Paradise Lost” Satan may
“Through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way.”