How, then, starting with the individual word, can you come into a knowledge of it, not in its public capacity, but in what is even more important, its personal connections?  You must form the habit of asking two questions about it:  (1) Is it married? (2) Of what family or families was it born?  If you can get an understanding answer to these two questions, an answer that will tell you what its relations stand for as well as what their name is, your inquiries will be anything but bootless.

Let us illustrate your procedure concretely.  Suppose you read or hear the word conchology.  It is a somewhat unusual word, but see what you can do with it yourself before calling on the dictionary to help you.  Observe the word closely, and you will obtain the answer to your first question. Conchology is no bachelor, no verbal old maid; it is a married pair.

Your second and more difficult task awaits you; you must ascertain the meaning of the family connections.  With Mr. Conch you are on speaking terms; you know him as one of the shells.  But the utmost you can recall about his wife is that she is one of a whole flock of ologies.  What significance does this relationship possess?  You are uncertain.  But do not thumb the dictionary yet.  Pass in mental review all the ologies you can assemble.  Wait also for the others that through the unconscious operations of memory will tardily straggle in.  Be on the lookout for ologies as you read, as you listen.  In time you will muster a sizable company of them.  And you will draw a conclusion as to the meaning of the blood that flows through their veins. Ology implies speech or study. Conchology, then, must be the study of conches.

Your investigations thus far have done more than teach you the meaning of the word you began with.  They have brought you some of the by-products of the study of verbal kinships.  For you no longer pass the ologies by with face averted or bow timidly ventured.  You have become so well acquainted with them that even a new one, wherever encountered, would flash upon you the face of a friend.  But now your desires are whetted.  You wish to find out how much you can learn.  You at last consult the dictionary.

Here a huge obstacle confronts you.  The ologies, like the ports (above), are a haughty clan; they are the wooed, rather than the wooing, members of most marital households that contain them.  Now the marriage licenses recorded in the dictionary are entered under the name of the suitor, not of the person sought.  Hence you labor under a severe handicap as you take the census of the ologies.  Let us imagine the handicap the most severe possible.  Let us suppose that no ology had ever been the suitor.  Even so, you would not be entirely baffled.  For you could look up in the dictionary the ologies you your self had been able to recall.  To what profit?  First, you could verify or correct your surmise as to what the ological blood betokens.  Secondly, you could perhaps obtain cross-references to yet other ologies than those you remembered.