Expressive English
Fernald, James Champlin, 1838-1918
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A Desk-book of Errors in English. Eleventh Edition. 12mo, Cloth. $1.00; by mail, $1.08. The Preparation of Manuscripts for the Printer. Fifth Revised Edition. 12mo, Cloth. $1.00; by mail, $1.08. Essentials of English Speech and Literature. Third Revised Edition. 8vo, Cloth. $1.50; by mail, $1.62. A Desk-book of Twenty-five Thousand Words Frequently Mispronounced. I2mot Cloth. $1.75; by mail, $1.87. The Development of the Dictionary of the English Language. Large Quarto, Cloth. $1.00; by mail, $1.16. By Sherwin Cody The Art of Speaking and Writing the English Language. A set of six handy manuals. I. Word-study; Spelling; Letter-writing, etc. II. Dictionary of Errors; Er- rors in Grammar, Pronunciation, Style, etc. III. Composi- tion; Description; Dialog, etc. IV. Story-writing; Journalism; Business Letters; Essays; Verse, etc. V. Grammar. VI. How and What to Read. 16mo, Cloth, Boxed. $4.50 Per Set; by mail, $4,62. [Not sold separately.] By Grenville Kleiser How tO Speak in Public. 12mo, Cloth. $1.50; by mail, $1.65. Talks On Talking. 12mo, Cloth. 75 cents; by mail, S3 cents. How to Read and Declaim. 12mo, Cloth. $1.50; by mail, $1.65. How to Argue and Win. 12mo, Cloth. $1.50; by mail, $1.65. How to Develop Power and Personality in Speaking. 12mo, Cloth. $1.50; by mail, $1.65 Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases. I2mo, Cloth. $1.60; by mail, $1.76. FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Publishers 354-360 FOURTH AVENUE, NEW YORK EXPRESSIVE ENGLISH THE LIBRARY DHIYEKSITY OF CALIFOIWBDi L08 BY JAMES C. FERNALD, L.H.D. AUTHOR OF "ENGLISH SYNONYMS, ANTONYMS, AND PREPOSITIONS," "CONNECTIVES OF ENGLISH SPEECH," "A WORKING GRAMMAR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE," "ENGLISH GRAMMAR SIMPLIFIED," ETC.; EDITOR OF A "STUDENTS' STANDARD DICTIONARY" ; ASSOCIATE EDITOR OF THE "STANDARD DICTIONARY," ETC. SECOND EDITION ® Ms © FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY NEW YORK AND LONDON 1919 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY [Printed in the United States of America] Copyright Under the Articles of the Copyright Convention of the Pan-American Republics and the United States, August 11, 1910 Published. September, 1918 PREFACE IT is often held to be a sufficient description or defini- tion of language to speak of it as "a medium of com- munication among intelligent beings." Language is that, indeed, and can never be less than that. But that is its lowest office. The hen calls her brood by a glad cluck to a fine bit of grain, or warns them by a terrifying note of the sweep of a hawk. But she has soon gone round the circle of ideas appropriate to her species, and the "medium of communication" has no place in the realm beyond, where for her and hers there is nothing to communicate. In all human beings, how- ever, except the most degraded, there is a demand for communication of thought and feeling from one to an- other beyond what language as used by them can yet convey. With all mental advance the reach and range and delicacy of thought and feeling evermore outstrip the capacity of words to utter them. Language is under a constant impulsion to express ideas and emotions which are still beyond its power. It is true that a decaying civilization may shrivel up, as it were, within a language, until it has no use for many words and phrases which were full of meaning to men of a nobler day. Such a language is in process of becoming a ' ' dead language, ' ' as the Greek and Latin were becoming in Europe five centuries ago. Then, if the civilization is really alive, new languages will arise to express the thought and feeling of the new time, as the languages of modern Europe arose when hu- v 2O7181O vi PREFACE manity awakened out of the night of the Middle Ages. How vast and wonderful were the needs for which these new languages had to provide expression! The in- vention of gunpowder, changing the whole art of war; the mariner's compass, opening sure ways across the pathless seas; the Copernican system of astronomy, giv- ing the world and man for the first time their true place in the celestial spaces; the science of chemistry in place of the superstitions of alchemy; steam and gas, electricity and magnetism, the printing-press, the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, photography, wireless telegraphy, and now aviation: — all these, as arts and processes of modern life, have driven every vigorous modern language into a chase for words and phrases expressive enough to keep up with the crowding thought and imagery of the life actually about us, and beyond the direct communication of ascertained facts able to utter the constantly deepen- ing and broadening visions and longings of the expand- ing human soul. To urge the expressiveness of language is to exalt the supremacy of thought. The language which is chiefly occupied with its own beauties is dying or dead; the language struggling to utter what is still beyond itself is alive, and none has more of this ex- pansive vigor than our own. English was a young, rude dialect when Latin was old and in ornamental decay; and the circumstances of the development of the new aspirant for power have never permitted it to evolve like a potato-sprout in a cellar, white, protracted, and delicate. By the exigen- cies of its existence it has been thrashed into sturdiness and vigor through centuries of conflict. Ever and ever- more the concentrated energy of expression of human thought and feeling has been thrust upon and through PEEFACE vii and through the language as the essential condition of its existence. Foremost in colonization, at the front in industrial and commercial achievement, possessed by that impulse of actual doing in the concrete world which we call "practical," full of the enthusiasm of freedom for each individual life, and yet with that power of combination that can cement millions scattered far over land and sea into the cohesion of an empire or a world-republic, spoken by more human beings than any other tongue now or in ages past existing among men, the number of persons using it being credibly estimated at one hundred and fifty millions, the English language must beyond all others seek and attain fulness of expression. It presses close up to the foremost line of the world's advance, to be ever ready with a new word or phrase for every new thought, discovery, invention, or achieve- ment. Voices from every range of human endeavor and every outreach of human intellect are calling the lan- guage on to express — express — express, ever more com- prehensively and minutely all the shades and lines of thought and feeling, now plain and direct as a concrete highway, now toilsomely ascending as a mountain path, or yet again diversified with flower and shrub and rock and light and shade and sudden windings as a wood- land road. Its ideal of utterance has come to be, not method, measure, melody, but meaning. "Fine writ- ing," once the ideal of many young writers, is now disesteemed. The best speaking or writing of English will be done always by asking "What do I really mean to say?" or "What do I most deeply want to say?" — in other phrase, "What for my purpose can words now and here best express?" The present author has long believed that much thor- viii PREFACE oughly correct English instruction fails by not keeping in view the higher possibilities of language, and by not awakening admiration, honor, and love for the English language as a great, beneficent, and living power. If students can be made to feel from the start that Eng- lish is a grand, noble, and mighty means for the ex- pression of thought, whether the simplest and plainest or the highest and most beautiful, they will feel a call to attain its mastery and a joy in bringing out its possibilities. Hence, in this work, the earnest endeavor has been to awaken interest, and even enthusiasm, for the language from the outset. For, what interests peo- ple they will learn, and learn readily. In a word, it has been believed that the rhetorical treatment of Eng- lish speech may be made an attractive and an easy study, often fascinating as one follows its rich possi- bilities of expression. The aim has been, as far as possible, to give princi- ples rather than precepts. Comparatively little is learned by a series of commandments. The most ex- cellent rules by themselves carry students but a little way. But a principle is living and of indefinite riches of application. Ideal is worth more than pattern. The precept settles one case; the principle is good for a thousand. It has also been believed that the rhetorical use of English may be taught in English. The Greek masters of rhetoric so impressed their personality and their methods upon all students that the very Greek words they used have been maintained for centuries with a reverent fear that the contents would be lost if the re- ceptacle were changed. Then the old schoolmen clung to the foreign phrases as making rhetoric an "art and mystery," which only the elect few could understand. PREFACE ix So our books still carry aposiopesis, prosopopeia, sy- necdoche, and zeugma, and similar scare-words, which even those who have once learned them in school are afraid to venture upon unprepared in later life. A few technical terms have been so far modernized that we do well to retain them, as synonym, simile, metaphor, etc. But the unfamiliar ones, if they mean anything, can be translated into English words, and if not, can be dropped. The plain English term has here been always preferred. Even difficult matters have been made to seem simple and easy where possible by simple explanations and the use of simple words. A seemingly off-hand statement has been put in place of a scholastic utterance in the belief that people learn best when they are not scared; — when the matter considered is pre- sented, not as the rare attainment of a few erudite scholars, but as something "on the level," in which the multitude, they themselves, starting where they are, and as they are, may expect to attain success. With the same object in view it has been found necessary to set a limit to the number of topics treated. The "elements of rhetoric" are so numerous that any attempt to cover them all in a book of moderate size reduces them to little more than an inventory or cata- logue. Such an inventory may be very useful, as a dictionary is, for definition and for reference, but it is not very readable. By its condensation all the ele- ments of rhetoric are placed practically upon a level, with no chance for variety or emphasis or play of thought and fancy — that is, with no chance for the very things the book is to teach — so that a treatise on rhetoric is often the driest and most unreadable thing that one can take up. In place of such crowding, it has seemed better to treat quite fully certain main ele- x PREFACE ments of the study, opening vistas, at certain points, with confidence that the student will almost instinctively apply the method, thus found interesting and helpful, to other branches of the great study. He will not know all of rhetoric, but what he knows, he will know. This method of treatment has succeeded in actual trial. These chapters were lectures given for a series of years to a class of about fifty students in the Young Men's Christian Association of Washington, D. C., and also to a class of public school teachers assembled under the same auspices. The young men were clerks, stenog- raphers, secretaries of senators, members of the staffs of various Washington papers, etc. They represented hundreds of thousands of bright young Americans who having learned enough to know that they should know more, but being engaged in the rush of life to make their way and their subsistence, were limited to such knowl- edge as could be rapidly gained. It was the impor- tunity of these students, their delight in the course, and their assurance of its practical helpfulness that first moved the author to publish the series. The familiar personal tone of the class-room lecture has been to a considerable degree retained, and the student seeking to make his way in studying by himself has been remem- bered with interest and sympathy, and numerous simple directions given for his benefit, as throughout chapters VI, IX, XVIII, and XIX, and on pages 96, 104-107, 117, 120, 159, 174, 220-221, 257-258, 295, 315, 337, 340, 352, 372-3-4, and numerous others. Whether studied in the class or individually, it is believed the book will be found readable and helpful for the mastery of impor- tant points of English style. J. C. F. Montclair, N. J., June 6, 1918. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAOE I. THE SIMPLICITY OF ENGLISH 1 II. THE POWER OF ENGLISH 24 III. THE ENGLISH TBEASUBY OF WORDS 63 IV. A WORLD-LITERATURE IN ENGLISH 79 V. ENGLISH SYNONYMS — THEIR ABUNDANCE AND HELP- FULNESS 98 VI. THE ENGLISH DICTIONARY AND How TO USE IT . 121 VII. ENGLISH CONNECTIVES — THE LINKS OF STYLE . . . 145 VIII. ENGLISH GRAMMAR — THE FRAME OF STYLE . . .179 IX. THE ENLARGEMENT AND IMPROVEMENT OF THE VOCABULARY 209 X. THE IMPOVERISHMENT OF THE VOCABULARY. CANT, SLANG, ETC 238 XI. DIFFICULTIES IN ENGLISH — THE WAY OUT . . . 254 XII. CLEARNESS OF STYLE 267 I. The Outfit for the Speaker or Writer. XIII. CLEARNESS OF STYLE 284 II. As Secured by Fitting Choice of Words. XIV. CLEARNESS OF STYLE 308 III. By Mastery of Sentence-Construction. XV. CLEARNESS OF STYLE 331 IV. By Items of Construction. XVI. THE ART OF BREVITY 351 XVII. FIGURES OF SPEECH 365 XVIII. INVENTIVE ART IN SPEAKING AND WRITING . . . 399 XIX. CONSTRUCTIVE LITERARY WORK 433 XX. LIFE THE SUPREME ACHIEVEMENT ....... 457 xi CHAPTER I THE SIMPLICITY OF ENGLISH Excellence in English is often sought too far afield. The trouble with many English grammarians and rhe- toricians has been that they have known too much. By the time a man has mastered the hundreds of parts of the Latin and the Greek verb and the Hiphil, Hophal, and Hithpael of the Hebrew; when he knows the five declensions of Latin and the three of Greek nouns, and the various declensions of adjectives to suit all those nouns; when he has labored through the Slough of Despond of German genders, and added a light fringe of French, Spanish, and Italian eccentricities, he is apt to become an incarnate inflection. He feels that lan- guage exists in order to be inflected. That is what it is for. It is beautiful and rich according as it can be tabulated in paradigms under the law of permutations. If he is a teacher, the possibilities of browbeating and sidetracking pupils, and of enticing them into laby- rinths where he alone holds the thread, become so allur- ing and soul-satisfying that he looks upon all that is self-evident and straightforward with the scorn of an expert in mysteries and occult arts. When there are no more dead or otherwise foreign languages to conquer, he sweeps his glance over the unfortunate English speech and sees it destitute and denuded of all its beloved intricacy — only here and there some remnant of old declension or conjugation standing 1 2 EXPRESSIVE ENGLISH separate and lonely, like surviving stumps after a forest fire. His grammatical soul aches over the "lost in- flections," and he puts on sackcloth and ashes for the "poverty" of his native tongue. English simplicity has become the "wailing place" of grammatical exiles. In this strange language, which simply adds one word to another and depends on having every word in its natural place, it is no longer possible to bury the subject in a mass of vocables and extricate it by the sure token that it is the only noun in the sentence which is not in the genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, or ablative case, and must, therefore, be the Jong-lost subject; or to put the adjective at one end of the sentence and the noun at the other, and have them respond to each other like the poles of an electric battery, however many miles of insulated wire the current may have to pass through between them. If compelled to express himself in this absurdly simple speech, he finds unexpected difficulties for want of the linguistic stays and trusses on which his foreign models have accustomed him to depend, and suffers the fate of the cab-horse in "Pickwick" that "would fall down as soon as he was took out of harness." He writes sentences like the card which a Greek professor is said to have put on the door of a college chapel at Oxford, "Chapel will commence tomorrow morning at nine o'clock, and continue until further notice." He dis- covers— or, at least, his readers or hearers discover — that the seeming ease of English expression is a fine art, which no one may hope to attain by laboriously learning "how not to do it." He longs to recast the language, and run it into traditional molds, from which it should come forth with cogs and cams and dovetails to be interlocked with mathematical precision. For some centuries the mechanics of language labored hard to import into English exotic complications, espe- cially adaptations of Latin rules and idioms. But those importations did not thrive in the rigorous English climate, where the winds of common sense are so very free and strong ; and there is now a prevalent disposition to make the best of a bad bargain, holding that as we are saddled with a language that knows no better than to say outright what it has to say, we must try to get some approximate order into this makeshift speech, giving attractive glimpses here and there of the beautiful in- flected languages, ancient and modern, which the pupil may hope to learn in the happier days to come, and the learning of which is the chief use of the formless English speech. Hence, English grammar has been largely apologetic, its keynote being that we express ourselves in this or that way because we can do no better, and that such a method is the best means of handling these loose threads of language, which have never been properly wound upon the bobbin of inflection. Richard Grant White proposed to cut the Gordian knot by treating English as ' ' The Grammarless Tongue. ' ' But his system did not prevail because it was not a system. The stub- born subconsciousness of the English-speaking world knows that there is a grammatical system in our lan- guage, if it can only be exhumed from under the ex- planations in which it has been buried. The key of this system is simplicity — always the most elusive thing in any line of research. Scholarship can discover everything except the obvious. The simplicity of English, which has been the torment of learned re- search, is the triumph and glory of the existing speech. The simplification of English speech was at first a dis- 4 EXPRESSIVE ENGLISH covery of happy accident, and then wrought out of set purpose through centuries of struggle and conflict. The founders of our English were a new people. In the fifth century of the Christian era, when the Roman Empire, which had stamped on the whole known world the seal of antiquity and imperialism, was tottering to its well-deserved fall, certain wild tribes, steadily driven northward before the Roman power, but never bowing to its dominion, had reached the bleak and barren shores of the North Sea. History calls them Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. As the land behind was closed to them, they took to the sea, and became the most daring of mariners and pirates. Not a shore but trembled when the horizon line was broken by their long black galleys filled with reckless freebooters who feared neither wave, nor storm, nor sword. When they found Britain de- fenceless, they descended upon it, exterminated or swept away the inhabitants and wiped every vestige of Roman civilization off the face of the land, except the Roman roads embedded in the soil. They started their world anew, and cut history in two with the sword. British history ends, and English history begins, with the Anglo-Saxon invasion in 449 A.D. These Anglo-Saxon conquerors of Britain had no past. All the storied centuries, from civilization's far begin- nings,— the marvels of sculptured Egypt, all the record of Babylon and Nineveh and Tyre, of Greece and Rome, were to them a blank. They knew no more of antiquity than if they had just come into being on a newly created planet. There they were. There was the sea which they knew how to tame and to traverse. There was the subjugated land under their feet. Their language was like themselves. It was nothing to them how other men had spoken. How could they best utter what they had THE SIMPLICITY OF ENGLISH 5 to say? They had nothing to learn from the Britons whom they conquered on every battle-field, nor from once imperial Rome, that now could not send one legion to dispute their dominion. There were differences of dialect among these Jutes, Angles and Saxons, but when all were shut up together in the conquered island, in order to live, trade, or even fight together, they were compelled to learn one another 's speech. In so doing, they stumbled, all unknowingly, upon a great law of language, that when different lan- guages of kindred stock meet and coalesce in the same territory, the effect is to drop inflections ; root-words are retained, but case-endings, niceties of conjugation and other mere refinements and complications are discarded. Thus, as the invaders became fused into one people in England, their different dialects were blended in a modi- fied language of increased simplicity. Scarcely was their conquest completed and their unity secured, ere the fame of their prosperity attracted new swarms of Northmen from Scandinavian and Danish shores — all indiscrim- inately called Danes — who conquered wide districts, and even, for a time, put on the throne of England a line of Danish kings. The whole process of fusion of lan- guages had to be done over again, and the speech of the new invaders was blended with the Anglo-Saxon, still in the line of simplicity, dropping what was complicated, and retaining what was easy to learn, while broadening the base of the language by the infusion of new elements. Then, upon the mingled peoples fell the mailed hand of the Norman, crushing them closer together, while for three hundred years the Normans occupied themselves in a vain endeavor to make Englishmen talk French, till at last it occurred to them that it would be easier for themselves to learn English. 6 EXPRESSIVE ENGLISH But in the long contest the Saxons had absorbed much from the French, still simplifying what they appropri- ated. They fell upon the French language, so far as they condescended to adopt it, as the Norman invaders had fallen upon their own island. Every French word, in order to be naturalized, had to pass under the English yoke, and no French word that has been through that process is ever recognized by the natives when it goes back home. On the fine inflections of French grammar the Englishman set his stubborn heel. He would use the French word if he must, but upon it he would play no foreign variations. Still less, if possible, would the Norman conquerors bother with what they deemed the barbarous intricacies of the Anglo-Saxon, and those were dropped by mutual consent. Thus a composite language was evolved, simpler than either of its proto- types. The fierce, and often apparently aimless contests of centuries blend in one great unity. From the landing of Hengist to the death of Chaucer — almost a thousand years — the process is one, the fusion of competing lan- guages, always in the direction of simplicity, always re- jecting complications of structure, always choosing the simpler forms. Simplification of speech had now come to seem natural to the Englishman. It had been from time immemorial an inherent process of language as he knew it. He had proved this simplicity to be consistent with clearness, and his practical good sense recognized that simplicity is power. Then he bent all his inventive skill to secure for his language the fulness of this in- herent power. He carried simplification constantly further of set and earnest purpose. Whenever he found a form still lingering that was troublesome, he weeded it out. All the tripping terminations that make so much THE SIMPLICITY OF ENGLISH 7 of the music of Chaucer's poetry went by the board. There should never be two syllables where one would do. The short, simple words are the most effective on the seay in the market, in the camp and on the battle-field, — come, go, hark, hear, march, charge, halt! Any added syllable would weaken those terms of concentrated force. In grammar every inflection must show a reason for its existence, or cease to exist. Whatever was difficult and complicated must go, unless the proof of its utility was stronger than the presumption against its difficulty. The reason commonly given for the substitution of the second person plural for the second person singular — "you" instead of "thou" — that it originated as a fad of courtesy, — may explain its origin, but its universal adop- tion is due to a deeper reason, namely, that the second person singular of the English verb is a complicated and difficult form, while the second person plural is simple to the last degree. With every principal verb in the language, and with every auxiliary except "must", the pronoun "thou" requires a special change in the form of the verb, which is often the only break in an otherwise uniform series. Thus, in the present tense of every verb, with the single exception of the verb "be", the pronoun "you" employs the unchanged root-form of the verb, as ' ' YOU love, have, can, do, shall, will," etc., while "thou" requires a change of form, as "THOU lovest, hast, canst, dost, shalt, wilt," etc. In every such choice the unchanged root-form has always the right of way. Again, with every pronoun but "thou" — still excepting the one verb "be" — the past tense of every verb is absolutely uniform, as "7, he, we, you, they, loved, had, could, did, should, would," but with "thou" we are driven to say "thou lovedst, hadst, couldst, didst, shouldst, wouldst," etc. Moreover, some 8 EXPRESSIVE ENGLISH of these forms are uneuphonic and exceedingly difficult to utter, requiring careful drill and momentary pause to shape the vocal organs for the utterance, as in couldst, shouldst, mightst, commandedst, interpretedst. Having thus two forms, one of which is almost invariably com- plicated and difficult, while the other is, with a single exception, simple and easy, the English-speaking men trampled on the rules of grammar, bidding defiance to the distinction of singular and plural, in order to make the simple form controlling and universal. Thus "you" has become everywhere current in the busy activities of life, while ' ' thou ' ' is carefully laid up in the museum of antiquity or the shrine of religion. How far this process of simplification has reached may be seen by comparing English at certain points with various other languages. Consider first the noun. The Greek noun has three declensions with five cases and three numbers, the singular, the dual, and the plural. That is, there are twelve forms in which any noun may appear, according to the special relation to be expressed. Which twelve any particular noun may take can only be known by knowing to which of the three declensions it belongs, so that it is really necessary to know thirty-six forms of the Greek noun in order to use any one noun properly. The Latin noun has five declensions and two numbers, singular and plural, with six cases in each number, making sixty forms, among which it is neces- sary to choose in order to use any one noun properly. The English noun is not troubled with declensions. While it has technically three cases, two of them, the nominative and the objective, are precisely alike; the possessive adds the apostrophe with s in the singu- lar and without s in the plural. The regular plural form adds s or es to the singular, with a small list of practically eight irregular plurals, as mice and men, and a few foreign plurals like strata and memoranda. But the crowning triumph of English is to be found in the simplicity of grammatical gender — that is, gender of Avords as words, irrespective of sex in the objects they represent. All the other leading languages give mascu- line or feminine gender to names of objects with which no thought of sex can be rationally associated, as moun- tains, rivers, trees, clothes, tools, articles of furniture, members of the human or animal body, etc. Some of these languages, as the French, Italian, and Spanish, have no neuter gender, so that every inanimate object must be represented by a masculine or feminine noun. Hence we often have a quiet smile when the Frenchman or Italian in his early experiments with English, speaks of the chair or table as ' ' she ' '. In languages like Greek, Latin, and German, which have a neuter gender, that gender is sometimes so capriciously applied that a neuter noun may be used for a living being which must have sex, as the German nouns madchen, ' ' maiden, ' ' and weib, t ' wife, " ' ' woman, ' ' are neuter. Ingenious theories have been advanced as to the giving of gender to inanimate objects on account of fauns, dryads, and other divinities, more or less divine, which were originally supposed to preside over some of them; but the elusive gender far outruns the theory. Why, for instance, should a man's head be feminine in Greek, neuter in Latin, feminine in French, masculine in German, and feminine again in Italian? The unpoetical fact seems to be that all this is due to a certain stupidity of generalization. Men of the early day seem to have concluded that because some nouns naturally have gender, therefore gender was an inevitable property of the noun per se, and they inflicted it accordingly, without reason or discrimination, upon 10 every unfortunate noun that came in their way. Then, as languages were artificially perfected, nouns were made masculine, feminine or neuter according to classification or termination without the slightest reference to nature. Here English made an entirely new departure, so that gender, as far as it is indicated in our language, usually follows the meaning of the noun to which it is ap- plied. "English stands entirely alone in making gen- der a rational and intelligible distinction; males are masculine, females are feminine, and inanimate things neuter. ' ' * The distinctiveness of English in this respect is strik- ingly illustrated by a comparison of dictionaries. Take a Greek, Latin, German, French, or Italian dictionary, and look down its columns; after every noun you will find a little letter, m, f, or n, as the case may be, de- noting the noun as masculine, feminine, or neuter. The gender must be expressly noted, because it is arbitrary, and by no means surely indicated by the meaning of the word. Now look down the columns of an English dictionary, noticing the nouns, and you will not find one m, f, or n. In English alone the gender is un- noted, because the meaning of the word usually tells it all, and no further specification is required. If the noun denotes a male being, it must, of course, be masculine; if a female being, feminine; if an inanimate object, neuter. Hence the English dictionary alone dispenses — and alone can dispense — with notification of gender. That poetic personification which sometimes refers to the sun as masculine or to the moon as feminine, or the sailor's reference to his ship as "she," constitutes no real exception to the rule, for in plain prose we say of the sun or the moon "its distance," "its diameter," or the * Ramsey: "The English Language and English Grammar," 231. THE SIMPLICITY OF ENGLISH 11 like, and we read in the Authorized Version of the Scrip- tures, ' ' The waves beat into the ship, so that it was now full." It is an inestimable advantage in our language that all the innumerable nouns denoting inanimate objects are regularly of the neuter gender, as by laws of thought they ought to be. That which is soulless in nature is naturally neuter in language. But, not satisfied with even this sweeping generaliza- tion, the English language takes a long step farther, and leaves the great majority of nouns denoting living beings utterly indeterminate in gender. No one can tell by the word itself whether friend, neighbor, companion, animal, quadruped, fish, or bird is masculine or feminine. A monarch, a sovereign, a citizen or a subject may be a man or a woman ; so may a writer, an author, or an editor, an agent or an attorney, an artist, a sculptor or a musician, a teacher or an instructor, a guest or a visitor, a relative or a stranger, an enemy or a foe; nor does the word we use indicate the sex of parent, babe, baby, child, ancestor or descendant. We know that these words are not neuter because they do not denote inanimate objects, and that is all we do know about them, as regards gender. 