You wish, then, to increase your vocabulary.  Of course you must become observant of words and inquisitive about them.  For words are like people:  they have their own particular characteristics, they do their work well or ill, they are in good odor or bad, and they yield best service to him who loves them and tries to understand them.  Your curiosity about them must be burning and insatiable.  You must study them when they have withdrawn from the throng of their fellows into the quiescence of their natural selves.  You must also see them and study them in action, not only as they are employed in good books and by careful speakers, but likewise as they fall from the lips of unconventional speakers who through them secure vivid and telling effects.  In brief, you must learn word nature, as you learn human nature, from a variety of sources.

Now in ordinary speech most of us use words, not as individual things, but as parts of a whole—­as cogs in the machine of utterance by which we convey our thoughts and feelings.  We do not think of them separately at all.  And this instinct is sound.  In our expression we are like large-scale manufacturing plants rather than one-man establishments.  We have at our disposal, not one worker, but a multitude.  Hence we are concerned with our employees collectively and with the total production of which they are capable.  To be sure, our understanding of them as individuals will increase the worth and magnitude of our output.  But clearly we must have large dealings with them in the aggregate.

This chapter and the following, therefore, are given over to the study of words in combination.  As in all matters, there is a negative as well as a positive side to be reckoned with.  Let us consider the negative side first.

Tameness

Correct diction is too often insipid.  There is nothing wrong with it, but it does not interest us—­it lacks character, lacks color, lacks power.  It too closely resembles what we conceive of the angels as having—­ impeccability without the warmth of camaraderie.  Speech, like a man, should be alive.  It need not, of course, be boisterous.  It may be intense in a quiet, modest way.  But if it too sedulously observes all the Thou shalt not’s of the rhetoricians, it will refine the vitality out of itself and leave its hearers unmoved.

That is why you should become a disciple of the pithy, everyday conversationalist and of the rough-and-ready master of harangue as well as of the practitioner of precise and scrupulous discourse.  Many a speaker or writer has thwarted himself by trying to be “literary.”  Even Burns when he wrote classic English was somewhat conscious of himself and made, in most instances, no extraordinary impression.  But the pieces he impetuously dashed off in his native Scotch dialect can never be forgotten.  The man who begins by writing naturally, but as his importance in the publishing world grows, pays more and more attention to felicities—­to