tisfy a
present need, but also to add permanently to your linguistic resources.

You have carried the study of individuals farther. You have come to know
words inside and out. Such knowledge not only assists you in your dealings
with your contemporaries; it illuminates for you great literature of the
past that otherwise would remain obscure. How much keener, for example, is
your understanding of Shakespeare's passage on the Seven Ages of Man
because of your thorough acquaintance with the single word
_pantaloon_! How quickly does the awe for big words slip from you
when you perceive that _precocious is_ in origin the equivalent of
_half-baked!_ What intimacy of insight into words you feel when you
find that a _companion is_ a _sharer of one's bread_! What a
linking of language with life you discover when you learn the original
signification of _presently_, of _idiot_, of _rival_, of
_sandwich_, of _pocket handkerchief_! And what revelations as
into a mystic fraternalism with words do you obtain when you confront
such a phrase as "the bank _teller_" or "cut to the _quick"!

_Not only have words become more like living beings to you; you have
learned to think of them in relations analogous to the human. You can
detect the blood kinship, for example, between _prescribe_ and
_manuscript_, and know that the strain of _fact_ or fie or fy in
a word is pretty sure to betoken making or doing. You know that there are
elaborate intermarriages among words. You recognize _phonograph_, for
example, as a married couple; you even have confidential word as to the
dowry brought by each of the contracting parties to the new verbal
household.

You have discovered, further, that the language actually swarms with
"pairs"--words joined with each other not in blood or by marriage but
through meaning. You have so familiarized yourself with hundreds of these
pairs that to think of one word is to call the other to mind.

Finally, and in many respects most important of all, you have acquired a
vast stock of synonyms. You have had it brought to your attention that the
number of basic ideas in the world is surprisingly small; that for each of
these ideas there is in our language one generic word; that most people
use this one word constantly instead of seeking the subsidiary term that
expresses a particular phase of the idea; and that you as a builder of
your vocabulary must, while holding fast to the basic idea with one hand,
reach out with the