spoken to the written.  When we read, as we say, “to ourselves,” we sometimes, if we are not skilful, pronounce the spoken words under our breath, or at least form them with our vocal organs.  You all remember the story of how the Irishman who could not read made his friend stop up his ears while reading a letter aloud, so that he might not hear it.  This anecdote, like all good comic stories, has something in it to think about.  The skilful reader does not even imagine the spoken words as he goes.  He forgets, for the moment, the spoken tongue and translates the written words and phrases directly into the ideas for which they stand.  A skilful reader thus takes in the meaning of a phrase, a sentence, even of a paragraph, at a glance.  Likewise the writer who sets his own thoughts down on paper need not voice them, even in imagination; he may also forget all about the spoken tongue and spread his ideas on the page at first hand.  This is not so common because one writes slower than he speaks, whereas he reads very much faster.  The swift reader could not imagine that he was speaking the words, even if he would; the pace is too incredibly fast.

Our written tongue, then, has come to be something of a language by itself.  In some countries it has grown so out of touch with the spoken tongue that the two have little to do with each other.  Where only the learned know how to read and write, the written language takes on a learned tinge; the popular spoken tongue has nothing to keep it steady and changes rapidly and unsystematically.  Where nearly all who speak the language also read and write it, as in our own country, the written tongue, even in its highest literary forms, is apt to be much more familiar and colloquial, but at the same time the written and the spoken tongue keep closer together.  Still, they never accurately correspond.  When a man “talks like a book,” or in other words, uses such language that it could be printed word for word and appear in good literary form, we recognize that he is not talking ordinary colloquial English—­not using the normal spoken language.  On the other hand, when the speech of a southern negro or a down-east Yankee is set down in print, as it so often is in the modern “dialect story,” we recognize at once that although for the occasion this is written language, it is not normal literary English.  It is most desirable that the two forms of speech shall closely correspond, for then the written speech gets life from the spoken and the spoken has the written for its governor and controller; but it is also desirable that each should retain more or less individuality, and fortunately it is almost impossible that they should not do so.