I. LETTER-WRITERS. Since old Leisure died, we have come to think ourselves altogether too fine and too busy to cultivate the delightful art of correspondence. Dickens seems to have been almost the last man among us who gave his mind to letter-writing; and his letters contain some of his very best work, for he plunged into his subject with that high-spirited abandonment which we see in "Pickwick," and the full geniality of his mind came out... more...

PREFACE. This work aims primarily at giving a list of Scandinavian loanwords found in Scottish literature. The publications of the Scottish Text Society and Scotch works published by the Early English Text Society have been examined. To these have been added a number of other works to which I had access, principally Middle Scotch. Some words have been taken from works more recent—"Mansie Wauch" by James Moir, "Johnnie Gibb" by William... more...

LESSON I FLAG DAY In this fair land of ours you can see the Stars and Stripes floating over every public school. This beautiful flag stands for our country. Every American is proud of his country's flag. It stands for all that is good and dear to an American. It stands for Liberty. It proclaims liberty to all. Every star stands for liberty. Every stripe stands for liberty. It stands for liberty of thought and liberty of speech as well. The... more...

Preface The purpose of this book, as conceived by the author, is not to attempt to create or to influence usage by pointing out which words should or should not be used, nor to explain the meaning of terms, but simply to provide in a form convenient for reference and study the words that can be used, leaving it to those who consult its pages to determine for themselves, with the aid of a dictionary if necessary, which words supply the... more...

INTRODUCTION Punctuation is a device by which we aid words to tell their story. Words have done this at times without such aid, and may now do so, but at constant risk of serious misunderstanding. This can be easily seen by reading the following lines printed as they would have been written in an ancient manuscript.... more...

It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the... more...

INTRODUCTIONBY DR. EDWIN C. HEWETT. I have long thought that the careful, discriminating study of words is much neglected in our schools. And I am glad to approve, and help to forward, anything that will promote such a study. Not only will such a study improve a person's language greatly, but it will, at the same time, do much to improve the clearness and precision of his thinking; thought and language have a reciprocal effect. If a child,... more...

INTRODUCTION TREATISE ON THE SUBLIME Boileau, in his introduction to his version of the ancient Treatise on the Sublime, says that he is making no valueless present to his age. Not valueless, to a generation which talks much about style and method in literature, should be this new rendering of the noble fragment, long attributed to Longinus, the Greek tutor and political adviser of Zenobia. There is, indeed, a modern English version by Spurden,... more...

I.—THE PROCESS BY COMBINATION. Two or more words may be united to form a new one, or to perform the office of a new one, and four methods or stages of combination may be noted. a. By juxtaposition, where the two words are placed together and yet remain as distinct words. This method is illustrated in Chinese, where the words in the combination when taken alone seldom give a clew to their meaning when placed together. b. By compounding,... more...

LECTURE I. INAUGURAL Wednesday, January 29, 1913 In all the long quarrel set between philosophy and poetry I know of nothing finer, as of nothing more pathetically hopeless, than Plato's return upon himself in his last dialogue 'The Laws.' There are who find that dialogue (left unrevised) insufferably dull, as no doubt it is without form and garrulous. But I think they will read it with a new tolerance, may-be even with a touch of feeling, if... more...