A speaker or writer is a host to verbal guests.  When he invites them to his assembly, he gives each the tacit assurance that it will not be brought into fellowship with those which in one or another of a dozen subtle ways will be uncongenial company for it.  He must never be forgetful of this unspoken promise.  If he is to avoid a linguistic breach, he must constantly have his wits about him; must study out his combinations carefully, and use all his knowledge, all his tact.  He will make due use of spontaneous impulse; but that this may be wise and disciplined, he will form the habit of curiosity about words, their stations, their savor, their aptitudes, their limitations, their outspokenness, their reticences, their affinities and antipathies.  Thus when he has need of a phrase to fill out a verbal dinner party, he will know which one to select.

Certain broad classifications of words are manifest even to the most obtuse user of English. Shady, behead, and lying are “popular” words, while their synonyms umbrageous decapitate,_ and mendacious are “learned” words. Flabbergasted and higgledy-piggledy are “colloquial,” while roseate and whilom are “literary.” Affidavit, allegro, lee shore, and pinch hit are “technical,” while vamp, savvy, bum hunch, and skiddoo are “slang.”  It would be disenchanting indeed were extremes of this sort brought together.  But offenses of a less glaring kind are as hard to shut out as February cold from a heated house.  Unusual are the speeches or compositions, even the short ones, in which every word is in keeping, is in perfect tune with the rest.

For the attainment of this ultimate verbal decorum we should have to possess knowledge almost unbounded, together with unerring artistic instinct.  But diction of a kind only measurably inferior to this is possible to us if we are in earnest.  To attain it we must study the difference between abstract and concrete terms, and let neither intrude unadvisedly upon the presence or functions of the other; do the same by literal and figurative terms and instruct ourselves in the nature and significance of connotation.

Before considering these more detailed matters, however, we may pause for a general exercise on verbal harmony.

EXERCISE — Discords

1.  Study the editorial in Appendix 1 for unforewarned changes in mood and assemblages of mutually uncongenial words.  Rewrite the worst two paragraphs to remove all blemishes of these kinds.

2.  Compare Burke’s speech (Appendix 2) with Defoe’s narrative (Appendix 5) for the difference in tone between them.  Does each keep the tone it adopts (that is, except for desirable changes)?

3.  Note the changes in tone in the Seven Ages of Man (Appendix 4).  Do the changes in substance, make these changes in tone desirable?