So far as concerns the actual number of words at our command, we can lose but a very few in the severest study of diction, and on the other hand we gain a great many. A Barbarism is a word which, strictly speaking, is not a word, according to good usage. A Solecism is an offence against the grammatical use of words. An Impropriety is a word otherwise unexceptional used in a sense not warranted by good usage. If any one who meant to say, "Who do they think is bound by the agreement ?" should write, "Who do they expect does it obligate?" he would commit all three errors. Obligate is a barbarism, who for whom is a solecism, and expect used in the sense of think is an impropriety. But if you will notice you will see that even in getting all the benefit from such criticism you lose but one word from your vocabulary. Obligate goes; but who and expect, although they were not rightly used in that sentence, are still at your service, and that in a way that they were not before. In other words, the only loss to the vocabulary under the most severely critical study is that of barbarisms. Now it has been remarked by various writers that the number of barbarisms in any person's vocabulary is, even in extreme cases, comparatively small. By far the greater number of cases that are brought to a teacher of rhetoric for his opinion are solecisms or improprieties. Few people remember many obsolete words; we have been pretty well laughed out of using foreign expressions; the chief source of danger is the tendency to colloquialism and to the formation of new compounds where we have enough good words without them. But a few barbarisms in any one's vocabulary make a great show; one is enough to taint a whole page. The numerical loss in getting rid of these will be very small, hardly more than one per cent with most of us. And this loss of barbarisms is probably made up by the restoration of other words to their true uses and a more accurate distribution of words to their ideas.

On

the whole, I should say the vocabulary was the gainer in quantity, even by critical work.

In another way, too, though it is not often thought of, do we make a real gain by this critical work. We all of us have two vocabularies: one of words we readily understand, and one of words we commonly use, the latter being much the smaller. Every one who has studied a foreign language I will at once see what I mean. Compare your readiness in reading Latin, for instance, and in writing Latin. There are plenty of us who can read what is written in a foreign language with ease, although we are quite unable to express ourselves in it. This is true not only of reading and writing, but of hearing and speaking. One learns to understand what is said to one long before one can talk intelligibly. Of course part of the difficulty lies in the syntax, which we rarely think of in reading and hearing, but which is a source of great anguish in writing and speaking. But a good part of the difficulty lies in our knowledge of the words.

As it is with a foreign language so is it in a minor degree with our mother tongue. Many words which we comprehend well enough as we read them lie entirely outside our speaking vocabulary. Probably every one has had the curious experience as a child when learning to read, of knowing perfectly well the look and sense of certain words which one never ventured to utter. It is much the same with us as we grow up, although we are not conscious of it. A simple proof of the matter lies in the ease with which we read Shakespeare. Shakespeare uses perhaps three times as many words as most of us do, and yet we recognize readily nine tenths of his words. That we are apt enough not to understand them in the sense in which he used them makes no difference; we understand them in some sense, but never use them at all. Now the more we study words and their meanings, even in the most critical manner,

the more do we familiarize ourselves with them, the more does our writing vocabulary approach our reading vocabulary. And this, from the rhetorical point of view, is a distinct gain.

Having seen, then, how far the critical study of diction is directly in the line of our aim, we may proceed to a short consideration of the points of most importance.

A. GOOD USAGE.

65. Good Usage is Changing. The first thing to be remarked is that here, as in every similar case, our first want is a standard. The very expressions "bad English,” “an incorrect use," and so on indicate by their adjectives the existence of some standard. The standard always accepted in our case is that of Good Usage. Of the characteristics of good usage I will speak in a minute, but I would first call your attention to the fact that it is by its very nature fluctuating and changing. It is this which gives a vague and somewhat unsatisfactory character to this branch of our subject. We cannot set down once for all a statement of correct and incorrect usage; each new generation has the task in hand to begin upon. Excellent illustrations of the changing character of usage may be found by reading that part of Campbell's Rhetoric which refers to diction. Campbell was presumably a good judge; certainly his Rhetoric, although written more than a hundred years ago, is in some respects authoritative. In what he says on the nature of Good Use he is as valuable as ever; the latest Rhetoric that I have seen (J. M. Hart, 1895) follows his characterization. But his examples often show very curiously how different is the standard of good usage nowadays from that of a hundred years ago.

For instance, Campbell says that advice meaning information is a commercial expression; it is so to-day. But

he says immediately afterward that nervous meaning of weak nerves is medical cant, and that turtle meaning tortoise is used only by sailors and gluttons. At present nervous meaning powerful and turtle meaning a kind of dove would, of course, be understood; but the meanings which in Campbell's day were not proper are now the commoner. So also he remarks that authenticity and vindictive will probably soon take the place of-what? Of authenticalness and vindicative, words which nowadays no one would think of uttering.

He speaks of certain Gallicisms, and mentions in the same list opine, ignore, fraicheur, adroitness, opinionatrety. Of these the second and fourth are to-day in good use, the first is esteemed a barbarism, the third is rarely heard, and the last can hardly be pronounced by us. Such a difference has a hundred years made in the way of looking at things which once seemed all of a kind.

That good usage should be constantly changing is not unnatural. Language itself, although we do not notice it, is constantly changing. Words change their form and their meaning continually.

The change of form in words, that is to say, a change in their pronunciation, is very obvious. The oldest English texts are to-day unreadable by Englishmen who have not given particular attention to the subject, and that not merely because some words have passed out of use. About half-way between our own time and the earliest written English that we have comes Chaucer. His work would seem more unfamiliar to a West Saxon of the eighth century than it does to us. But we need not go so far back as Chaucer for evidence. We cannot read the poetry of the eighteenth century without perceiving that not a few words that once rhymed together have changed their form so that we have no rhyme at all or something that makes us laugh.

"Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes council take and sometimes tea."

POPE: Rape of the Lock, canto iii. 11. 7, 8.

The change of meaning in words is one of the most interesting of linguistic studies. I will give example of but one kind of change, the nature of which is familiar enough to you already. The following words may be found in the first half of the seventeenth century with the meanings set against them:

To prevent reiterate

err

incense

Retorted

Candor

Continent

To go before

go back and forth
wander

burn

Twisted back, as hair from

the forehead.

Whiteness

Anything that contains, e.g.,

an apron with flowers in it. In all these cases the physical meaning, if we may so call it, has wholly passed away, leaving only the metaphorical sense.

Language itself being therefore in such a state of perpetual flux, it is not at all remarkable that good usage should vary also. It is all arbitrary, all the result of unexpressed agreement. If we could all get together, we might make any changes in the language that we chose, and if we could hold to them it would be well enough. As it is, everybody approximates to what he hears from everybody else, and so a rough kind of balance is struck.

66. Characteristics of Good Usage. But since Good Usage varies we must get as near as we can to the good usage of the Present. The first point generally agreed upon concerning good usage is that it should be Present Usage. There is, perhaps, a little doubt as to just what we should call Present Usage. I should myself say the