in conversation.  The sense of a word may be extended, or be restricted, or there may be a transfer of meaning.  In the colloquial use of “funny” we have an extension of its literary sense.  The same is true of “splendid,” “jolly,” “lovely,” and “awfully,” and of such Latin words as “lepidus,” “probe,” and “pulchre.”  When we speak of “a splendid sun,” we are using splendid in its proper sense of shining or bright, but when we say, “a splendid fellow,” the adjective is used as a general epithet expressing admiration.  On the other hand, when a man of a certain class refers to his “woman,” he is employing the word in the restricted sense of “wife.”  Perhaps we should put in a third category that very large colloquial use of words in a transferred or figurative sense, which is illustrated by “to touch” or “to strike” when applied to success in getting money from a person.  Our current slang is characterized by the free use of words in this figurative way.

Under the head of syntax we must content ourselves with speaking of only two changes, but these were far-reaching.  We have already noticed the analytical tendency of preliterary Latin.  This tendency was held in check, as we have just observed, so far as verb forms were concerned, but in the comparison of adjectives and in the use of the cases it steadily made headway, and ultimately triumphed over the synthetical principle.  The method adopted by literary Latin of indicating the comparative and the superlative degrees of an adjective, by adding the endings -ior and -issimus respectively, succumbed in the end to the practice of prefixing plus or magis and maxime to the positive form.  To take another illustration of the same characteristic of popular Latin, as early as the time of Plautus, we see a tendency to adopt our modern method of indicating the relation which a substantive bears to some other word in the sentence by means of a preposition rather than by simply using a case form.  The careless Roman was inclined to say, for instance, magna pars de exercitu, rather than to use the genitive case of the word for army, magna pars exercitus.  Perhaps it seemed to him to bring out the relation a little more clearly or forcibly.

The use of a preposition to show the relation became almost a necessity when certain final consonants became silent, because with their disappearance, and the reduction of the vowels to a uniform quantity, it was often difficult to distinguish between the cases.  Since final -m was lost in pronunciation, Asia might be nominative, accusative, or ablative.  If you wished to say that something happened in Asia, it would not suffice to use the simple ablative, because that form would have the same pronunciation as the nominative or the accusative, Asia(m), but the preposition must be prefixed, in Asia.  Another factor cooperated with those which have already been mentioned in bringing about the confusion of the cases.  Certain prepositions were used with the accusative