words you feel when you find that a companion is a sharer of one’s bread!  What a linking of language with life you discover when you learn the original signification of presently, of idiot, of rival, of sandwich, of pocket handkerchief!  And what revelations as into a mystic fraternalism with words do you obtain when you confront such a phrase as “the bank teller” or “cut to the quick”!

Not only have words become more like living beings to you; you have learned to think of them in relations analogous to the human.  You can detect the blood kinship, for example, between prescribe_ and manuscript, and know that the strain of fact or fie or fy in a word is pretty sure to betoken making or doing.  You know that there are elaborate intermarriages among words.  You recognize phonograph, for example, as a married couple; you even have confidential word as to the dowry brought by each of the contracting parties to the new verbal household.

You have discovered, further, that the language actually swarms with “pairs”—­words joined with each other not in blood or by marriage but through meaning.  You have so familiarized yourself with hundreds of these pairs that to think of one word is to call the other to mind.

Finally, and in many respects most important of all, you have acquired a vast stock of synonyms.  You have had it brought to your attention that the number of basic ideas in the world is surprisingly small; that for each of these ideas there is in our language one generic word; that most people use this one word constantly instead of seeking the subsidiary term that expresses a particular phase of the idea; and that you as a builder of your vocabulary must, while holding fast to the basic idea with one hand, reach out with the other for the fit, sure material of specific words.  Nor have you rested in the mere perception of theory.  You have had abundant practice, have yourself covered the ground foot by foot.  You can therefore proceed with reasonable freedom from the commoner ideas of the human mind to that expression of definite aspects of them which is anything but common.

You have not, of course, achieved perfection.  There still is much for you to do.  There always will be.  Nevertheless in the ways just reviewed, and in various other ways not mentioned in this chapter, you have made yourself verbally rich.  You are one of the millionaires of language.  When you speak, it is not with stammering incompetence, but with confident readiness.  When you write, it is with energy and assurance in the very flow of the ink.  Where you had long been a slave, you have become a freeman and can look your fellows in the eye.  You have the best badge of culture a human being can possess.  You have power at your tongue’s end.  You have the proud satisfaction of having wrought well, and the inspiration of knowing that whatever verbal need may arise, you are trained and equipped to grapple with it triumphantly.