Words; Their Use and Abuse

by William Mathews

The light that shines from loving eyes upon

Eyes that love back, till they can see no more.”

Here, out of thirty different words, but one is a long one; nearly all the rest are monosyllables.

Herbert Spencer, in an able paper on the “Philosophy of Style,” has pointed out the superior forcibleness of Saxon-English to Latin-English, and shown that it is due largely to the comparative brevity of the Saxon. If a thought gains in energy in proportion as it is expressed in fewer words, it must also gain in energy in proportion as the words in which it is expressed have fewer syllables. If surplus articulations fatigue the hearer, distract his attention, and diminish the strength of the impression made upon him, it matters not whether they consist of entire words or of parts of words. “Formerly,” says an able writer, “when armies engaged in battle, they were drawn up in one long line, fighting from flank to flank; but a great general broke up this heavy mass into several files, so that he could bend his front at will, bring any troops he chose into action, and, even after the first onslaught, change the whole order of the field; and though such a broken line might not have pleased an old soldier’s eye, as having a look of weakness about it, still it carried the day, and is everywhere now the arrangement. There will thus be an advantage, the advantage of suppleness, in having the parts of a word to a certain degree kept by themselves; this, indeed, is the way with all languages as they become more refined; and so far are monosyllabic languages from being lame and ungainly, that such are the sweetest and gracefulest, as those of Asia; and the most rough and untamed (those of North America) abound in huge unkempt words,—yardlongtailed, like fiends.”

I have spoken in the previous chapter of Johnson’s fondness for big, swelling words, the leviathans of the lexicon, and also of certain speakers and writers in our own day, who have an equal contempt for small words, and never use one when they can find a pompous polysyllable to take its place. It is evident from the passages I have cited, that these Liliputians,—these Tom Thumbs of the dictionary,—play as important a part in our literature as their bigger and more magniloquent brethren. Horne Tooke admitted their force, when, on his trial for high treason, he said that he was “the miserable victim of two prepositions and a conjunction.” Like the infusoria of our globe, so long unnoticed, which are now known to have raised whole continents from the depths of the ocean, these words, once so despised, are now rising in importance, and are admitted by scholars to form an important class in the great family of words.

The class of small words which were once contemptuously called “particles,” are now acknowledged to be the very bolts, pins, and hinges of the structure of language. Their significance increases just in the degree that a nation thinks acutely and expresses its thought accurately. An uncultivated idiom can do without them; but as soon as a people becomes thoughtful, and wishes to connect and modify its ideas,—in short, to pursue metaphysical inquiries, and to reason logically,—the microscopic parts of speech become indispensable. In some kinds of writing the almost exclusive use of small words is necessary. What would have been the fate of Bunyan’s immortal book, had he told the story of the Pilgrim’s journey in the ponderous, elephantine “osities” and “ations” of Johnson, or the gorgeous Latinity of Taylor? It would have been like building a boat out of timbers cut out for a ship. It is owing to this grandiose style, as much as to any other cause, that the author of the “Rambler,” in spite of his sturdy strength and grasp of mind, “lies like an Egyptian king, buried and forgotten in the pyramid of his fame.” When a man half understands the subject of which he speaks or writes, he will, like Goldsmith’s schoolmaster, use words of “learned length and thundering sound.” But when he is master of his theme, and when he feels deeply, he will use short, plain words which all can understand. Rage and fear, it has been happily said, strike out their terms like the sharp crack of the rifle when it sends its bullets straight to the point.[12] When, after wearily waiting in Chesterfield’s ante-room, Johnson wrote his indignant letter, he broke away, to a considerable extent, from his usual elephantine style, and used short, sharp, and stinging terms.

In conclusion, when we remember that the Saxon language, the soul of the English, is essentially monosyllabic; that our language contains, of monosyllables formed by the vowel a alone, more than five hundred; by the vowel e, some four hundred and fifty; by the vowel i, about four hundred; by the vowel o, over four hundred; and by the vowel u, more than two hundred and fifty; we must admit that these seemingly petty and insignificant words, even the microscopic particles, so far from meriting to be treated as “creepers,” are of high importance, and that to know when and how to use them is of no less moment to the speaker or writer than to know when to use the grandiloquent expressions which we have borrowed from the language of Greece and Rome. To every man who has occasion to teach or move his fellow-men by tongue or pen, I would say in the words of Dr. Addison Alexander,—themselves a happy example of the thing he commends:

“Think not that strength lies in the big round word,

Or that the brief and plain must needs be weak.

To whom can this be true who once has heard