EXERCISE G

Supply eight or ten intervening words between each of the following pairs. 
Arrange the intervening words in an ascending scale.

Dark, bright Wet, dry
Savage, civilized Beautiful, ugly
Friend, enemy Hope, despair
Wise, foolish Love, hate
Enormous, minute Admirable, abominable
Curse, bless Pride, humility

IX

    MANY-SIDED WORDS

In Chapter VII you made a study of printed distinctions between synonyms.  In Chapter VIII you were given lists of synonyms and made the distinctions yourself.  Near the close of Chapter VIII you were given words and discovered for yourself what their synonyms are.  This third stage might seem to reveal to you the full joys and benefits of your researches in this subject.  Certainly to find a new word for an old one is an exhilarating sort of mental travel.  And to find a new word which expresses exactly what an old one expressed but approximately is a real acquisition in living.  But you are not yet a perfectly trained hunter of synonyms.  Some miscellaneous tasks remain; they will involve hard work and call your utmost powers into play.

Of these tasks the most important is connected with the hint already given that many words, especially if they be generic words, have two or more entirely different meanings.  Let us first establish this fact, and afterwards see what bearing it has on our study of synonyms.

My friend says, “I hope you will have a good day.”  Does he mean an enjoyable one in general? a profitable or lucrative one, in case I have business in hand? a successful one, if I am selling stocks or buying a house?  Possibly he means a sunshiny day if I intend to play golf, a snowy day if I plan to go hunting, a rainy day if my crops are drying up.  The ideas here are varied, even contradictory, enough; yet good may be used of every one of them. Good is in truth so general a term that we must know the attendant circumstances if we are to attach to it a signification even approximately accurate.  This does not at all imply that good is a term we may brand as useless.  It implies merely that when our meaning is specific we must set good aside (unless circumstances make its sense unmistakable) in favor of a specific word.

Things is another very general term.  In “Let us wash up the things” it likely means dishes or clothes.  In “Hang your things in the closet” it likely means clothes.  In “Put the things in the tool-box” it likely means tools.  In “Put the things in the sewing-basket” it likely means thread, needles, and scissors.  In “The trenches are swarming with these things” it likely means cooties.  A more accurate word is usually desirable.  Yet we may see the value of the generality in the saying “A place for everything, and everything in its place.”