limb Gain Oppose Trick
Collect Generous Persist Wash
Commanding Grim Revise Worship
Compel Groan Room

EXERCISE G

Supply eight or ten intervening words between each of the following pairs.
Arrange the intervening words in an ascending scale.

Dark, bright Wet, dry
Savage, civilized Beautiful, ugly
Friend, enemy Hope, despair
Wise, foolish Love, hate
Enormous, minute Admirable, abominable
Curse, bless Pride, humility

IX

MANY-SIDED WORDS

In Chapter VII you made a study of printed distinctions between synonyms.
In Chapter VIII you were given lists of synonyms and made the distinctions
yourself. Near the close of Chapter VIII you were given words and
discovered for yourself what their synonyms are. This third stage might
seem to reveal to you the full joys and benefits of your researches in
this subject. Certainly to find a new word for an old one is an
exhilarating sort of mental travel. And to find a new word which expresses
exactly what an old one expressed but approximately is a real acquisition
in living. But you are not yet a perfectly trained hunter of synonyms.
Some miscellaneous tasks remain; they will involve hard work and call your
utmost powers into play.

Of these tasks the most important is connected with the hint already given
that many words, especially if they be generic words, have two or more
entirely different meanings. Let us first establish this fact, and
afterwards see what bearing it has on our study of synonyms.

My friend says, "I hope you will have a good day." Does he mean an
enjoyable one in general? a profitable or lucrative one, in case I have
business in hand? a successful one, if I am selling stocks or buying a
house? Possibly he means a sunshiny day if I intend to play golf, a snowy
day if I plan to go hunting, a rainy day if my crops are drying up. The
ideas here are varied, even contradictory, enough; yet _good_ may be
used of every one of them. _Good_ is in truth so general a term that
we must know the attendant circumstances if we are to attach to it a
signification even approximately accurate. This does not at all imply that
_good is_ a term we may brand as useless. It implies merely that when
our meaning is specific we must set _good_ aside (unless
circumstances make its sense unmistakable) in favor of a specif