Our investigation into the nature, qualities, and fortunes of single words must now merge into a study of their family connections.  We do not go far into this new phase of our researches before we perceive that the career of a word may be very complicated.  Most people, if you asked them, would tell you that an individual word is a causeless entity—­a thing that was never begotten and lacks power to propagate.  They would deny the possibility that its course through the world could be other than colorless, humdrum.  Now words thus immaculately conceived and fatefully impotent, words that shamble thus listlessly through life, there are.  But many words are born in an entirely normal way; have a grubby boyhood, a vigorous youth, and a sober maturity; marry, beget sons and daughters, become old, enfeebled, even senile; and suffer neglect, if not death.  In their advanced age they are exempted by the discerning from enterprises that call for a lusty agility, but are drafted into service by those to whom all levies are alike.  Indeed in their very prime of manhood their vicissitudes are such as to make them seem human.  Some rise in the world some sink; some start along the road of grandeur or obliquity, and then backslide or reform.  Some are social climbers, and mingle in company where verbal dress coats are worn; some are social degenerates, and consort with the ragamuffins and guttersnipes of language.  Some marry at their own social level, some above them, some beneath; some go down in childless bachelorhood or leave an unkempt and illegitimate progeny.  And if you trace their own lineage, you will find for some that it is but decent and middle-class, for some that it is mongrelized and miscegenetic, for some that it is proud, ancient, yea perhaps patriarchal.

It is contrary to nature for a word, as for a man, to live the life of a hermit.  Through external compulsion or internal characteristics a word has contacts with its fellows.  And its most intimate, most spontaneous associations are normally with its own kindred.

In our work hitherto we have had nothing to say of verbal consanguinity.  But we have not wholly ignored its existence, for the very good reason that we could not.  For example, in the latter portions of Chapter IV we proceeded on the hypothesis that at least some words have ancestors.  Also in the analysis of the dictionary definition of tension we learned that the word has, not only a Latin forebear, but French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian kinsmen as well.  One thing omitted from that analysis would have revealed something further—­namely, that the word has its English kinfolks too.  For the bracketed part of the dictionary definition mentions two other English words, tend and tense, which from their origin involve the same idea as that of tension—­ the idea of stretching.

Now words may be akin in either of two ways.  They may be related in blood.  Or they may be related by marriage.  Let us consider these two kinds of connection more fully.