Words and Their Ways in English Speech

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III LEARNED WORDS AND POPULAR WOKDS In every cultivated language there are two great classes of words which, taken together, comprise the whole vocabulary. First, there are those words with which we become acquainted in ordinary conversation, ? which we learn, that is to say, from the members of our own family and from our familiar associates, and which we should know and use even if we could not read or write. They concern the common things of life, and are the stock in trade of all who speak the language. Such words may be called ' popular, ' since they belong to the people at large and are not the exclusive possession of a limited class. On the other hand, our language includes a multitude of words which are comparatively seldom used in ordinary conversation. Their meanings are known to every educated person, but there is little occasion to employ them at home or in the market-place. Our first acquaintance with them comes not from our mother's lips or from the talk of our schoolmates, but from books that we read, lectures that we hear, or the more formal conversation of highly educated speakers, who are discussing some particular topic in a style appropriately elevated above the habitual level of everyday life. Such words are called 'learned, ' and the distinction between them and 'popular' words is of great importance to a right understanding of linguistic process. The difference between popular and learned words may be easily seen in a few examples. We may describe a girl as 'lively' or as 'vivacious.' In the first case, we are using a native English formation from the familiar noun life. In the latter, we are using a Latin derivative which has precisely the same meaning. Yet the atmosphere of the two words is quite different. No one ever got the adjective l.