conventional and the personal. In other words, he must make himself easily understood, and at the same time express the texture of his own character.

II. THE NEED OF IMPROVING THE VOCABULARY

The necessity of improving our vocabularies becomes evident as soon as we attempt to measure them by this twofold standard. Immediately we discover how impossible it is for us to express ourselves adequately. We can see the matter convincingly, perhaps, if we only remember that our reading vocabularies contain four or five times as many words as we use in writing and speaking.1 That is to say, we possess a large fund of knowledge which is quite unavailable for constructive work. Moreover, much of the knowledge that we do use, though imperfectly, as well as the thinking we base upon it, remains indefinite and inaccurate for the simple reason that we have not developed a vocabulary commensurate with our needs. Evidence of this inadequacy we encounter every day. We are encountering it when we say, "I know fully what I mean, but when I say it, it doesn't suit me," or The word doesn't quite express my meaning," or "I should never say it in that way." We are encountering a different kind of evidence on the same matter` when in our reading we feel sure that the writer, though he be recognized as having skill, has in some cases weakened his effects by employing unpleasant or impotent words. Although we succeed in gaining his rough, unfinished meaning, we are sure that he did not say quite what he meant to say, and that because of his cramped vocabulary he was not altogether certain that he himself knew when he had expressed the content of his mind. Of course, our knowledge will, in a way, always run

1 For several years the numerical strength of the "average man's" supply of words has been much discussed. Although it undoubtedly is not great, there is good reason to believe that it is greater than is generally supposed. Probably the average college freshman uses three or four thousand words. For an account of studies that the authors made for the purpose of determining the size of the working vocabulary, see the Nation, Vol. 93, pp. 11 and 262.

far ahead of our powers of expression; but as long as the part of our mental experience about which we can speak or write in only the most indefinite terms is large, we may be assured that there is still much need of improving our working vocabularies.

III. AIMS IN IMPROVING THE VOCABULARY

The desired twofold expressiveness of words is always reducible to what Professor Palmer has aptly called range and accuracy. Unless we have many words at command, we cannot write with any degree of effectiveness about some subjects in which we are genuinely interested. If we try to discuss those matters, we never quite make ourselves understood; and our readers smile the smile of pity. But it is not enough to have a wide vocabulary; the words we know must be made to serve us easily and fully. We must know them so well and have such a completely developed feeling for all their possible meanings that we shall not only say what we have to say, but know in advance just what kind of impression we are going to produce. In other words, we must feel a certain personal ownership in the language we write. If we do not, we shall always be lost when trying to make close discriminations in meaning; we shall be compelled either to deal in generalizations or to run the risk of falling into obvious misstatement. All around us we see the unhappy result. College men and women call every object merely a "thing" or a "business" or a "proposition"; attribute to every desirable experience, condition, or skill, the indefinite quality "clever," "good," or "nice" "; and express all relations with "but," "and," and "so." Such vagueness, some one may say, indicates lack of thinking. Undeniably it does. It indicates that we neglect the highest kind of thinking, -"thinking thoughts out into words." And if we hope to convince others that we do not in reality suffer from a dearth of ideas, we must command our words well enough to express ourselves clearly, sharply, and interestingly; for words are the only body in which the spirit of thought can go forth.

IV. MEANS OF IMPROVING THE VOCABULARY

Can much of this richness of vocabulary be gained by conscious effort? Is it not true that most of the words we use freely come to us through unconscious assimilation? Yes. Undoubtedly the greater part of the word supply we have at the age of twenty has come to us as the direct result of a necessity created by experience. And it is likewise true that if we could by any rare good fortune be thrown into such a variety of personal experiences that we should be compelled to use new words every day, there would be comparatively little reason for attempting to improve our vocabularies by conscious effort. It would be delightfully profitable to come into contact with every object that might enforce upon us the use of any desirable new word. But for most of us, such a course is utterly impossible. If, then, we hope to make very substantial progress in developing our stock of words, it remains for us to supplement in some way the slow, unconscious assimilation that we usually regard as the natural means of improvement. We must experiment with meanings. We cannot employ words skillfully if we do not set about finding them until we think we have immediate need. The poor, colorless, jaded words perhaps will come without preliminary effort; but the strong words, the right words, will not. We must be all the time searching for them, so that in the day of need we shall have them ready.

Our own reasoning on this matter does not stand alone. Writers and speakers differing widely in their early experience as students have testified in favor of some kind of systematic increase of the working vocabulary. Let us hear two or three.

"About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, tried to com

plete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rime, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and complete the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious." 1

"All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use; it was written conscientiously 1 Franklin, Autobiography, p. 60 in the Gateway edition. American Book Company.

for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practiced to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to anyone with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations from memory."1

Théophile Gautier, the French writer, not only studied the dictionary, from which he compiled lists of words and descriptive phrases that promised to be valuable to him later, but he collected striking words from every source and made them into a working dictionary of his own. One of his biographers has said concerning the method and its result: "His 'dictionary' was of inconceivable richness; not a word escaped him. In his reading, which included nearly all the works of French literature since the Renaissance, he had collected expressive words that had fallen into disuse, words scarcely known to the learned, and quite unknown to people generally. These he revived and restored to their right to be used in the world of letters through his own ability to use them with appropriateness and sagacity."2

It is an equally significant fact that when fifty other writers, all of them living and writing in America to-day, were asked about means of increasing the vocabulary, more than half of them replied that they had at some time enlarged and improved their stock of ready words by systematic study and practice.

Some one may suggest, however, that the means must be far away. Not at all. In truth, they are so simple and so near at hand that we are likely to look beyond them. If we could only acquire new words by climbing a high mountain, or by paying

1 Stevenson, A College Magazine.

2 Maxime du Camp, Théophile Gautier, p. 136.