The principle of proceeding from the known to the unknown may be applied to synonyms in various ways.  Two of these—­the two of most importance—­we must consider here.

First, you should reckon with your personal, demonstrated needs.  Just as you have already analyzed your working vocabulary for its general limits and shortcomings, so should you analyze it with particular reference to your poverty in synonyms.  Watch your actual speech; make a list of the words—­nouns, verbs, and adjectives particularly—­that you employ again and again.  Make each of these words the starting-point for a linguistic exploring expedition.  First, write the word down.  Then under it write all the synonyms that come forthwith to your mind.  These constitute your present available stock; in speaking or writing you could, if you kept yourself mentally alert, summon them on the moment.  But the list, as you know, is not exhaustive.  Draw a line under it and subjoin such synonyms as come to you after reflection.  These constitute a second stock, not instantaneously available, yet to be tagged as among your resources.  Next add a list of the synonyms you find through research, through a ransacking of dictionaries and books of synonyms.  This third stock, but dimly familiar if familiar at all, is in no practical sense yours.  And indeed some of the words are too abstruse, learned, or technical for you to burden your memory with them.  But many—­most—­are worth acquiring.  By writing down the words of these three classes you have done something to stamp them upon your memory as associates.  You must now make it your business to bring them into use.  Never call upon them for volunteers, but like a wise commander summon the individual that can rightly perform a particular service.  Thus will your speech, perhaps vague and indolent now, become exact, discriminating, competent, vital.

In the second place, you should obtain specific and detailed command of general ideas.  Not of out-of-the-way ideas.  But of the great basic ideas that are the common possession of all mankind.  For through these basic ideas is the most natural and profitable approach to the study of synonyms.  Each of them is represented by a generic word.  So elementary are idea and word alike that a person cannot have the one in mind without having the other ready and a-quiver on his tongue.  Every person is master of both.  But it is unsafe to predicate the person’s acquaintance with the shades and phases of the idea, or with the corresponding discriminations in language.  He may not know them at all, he may know them partially, he may know them through and through.  Let us suppose him ignorant of them but determined to learn.  His progress, both in the thought and in the language, will be from the general to the specific.  His acquaintance with the idea in the large he will gradually extend to an acquaintance with it in detail, and his command of the broad term for it he will little by little supplement with definite terms for its phases.  An illustration will make this clear.