frequency of this usage reminds one in turn of the fact that not infrequently in the Romance languages the corresponding words are diminutive forms in their origin, so that evidently the diminutive in these cases crowded out the primitive word in popular use, and has continued to our own day.  The reason why the diminutive ending was favored does not seem far to seek.  That suffix properly indicates that the object in question is smaller than the average of its kind.  Smallness in a child stimulates our affection, in a dwarf, pity or aversion.  Now we give expression to our emotion more readily in the intercourse of every-day life than we do in writing, and the emotions of the masses are perhaps nearer the surface and more readily stirred than are those of the classes, and many things excite them which would leave unruffled the feelings of those who are more conventional.  The stirring of these emotions finds expression in the use of the diminutive ending, which indirectly, as we have seen, suggests sympathy, affection, pity, or contempt.  The ending -osus for adjectives was favored because of its sonorous character.  Certain prefixes, like de-, dis-, and ex-, were freely used with verbs, because they strengthened the meaning of the verb, and popular speech is inclined to emphasize its ideas unduly.

To speak further of derivation, in the matter of compounds and crystallized word groups there are usually differences between a spoken and written language.  The written language is apt to establish certain canons which the people do not observe.  For instance, we avoid hybrid compounds of Greek and Latin elements in the serious writing of English.  In formal Latin we notice the same objection to Greco-Latin words, and yet in Plautus, and in other colloquial writers, such compounds are freely used for comic effect.  In a somewhat similar category belong the combinations of two adverbs or prepositions, which one finds in the later popular Latin, some of which have survived in the Romance languages.  A case in point is ab ante, which has come down to us in the Italian avanti and the French avant.  Such word-groups are of course debarred from formal speech.

In examining the vocabulary of colloquial Latin, we have noticed its comparative poverty, its need of certain words which are not required in formal Latin, its preference for certain prefixes and suffixes, and its willingness to violate certain rules, in forming compounds and word-groups, which the written language scrupulously observes.  It remains for us to consider a third, and perhaps the most important, element of difference between the vocabularies of the two forms of speech.  I mean the use of a word in vulgar Latin with another meaning from that which it has in formal Latin.  We are familiar enough with the different senses which a word often has in conversational and in literary English.  “Funny,” for instance, means “amusing” in formal English, but it is often the synonym of “strange”