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_thole_ and _nesh_ and _lew_ and _mense_ and _foison_ and _fash_ and _douce_, which have never been accepted into the standard English, or have long since vanished from it, in spite of their excellence and ancient history, and in spite of the fact that they have long been in current use in various districts. Others are new formations, coined in the ever-active mint of uneducated speech, and many of these, coming as they do full of freshness and vigour out of the vivid popular imagination--words like _harum-scarum_, _gallivant_, _cantankerous_, and _pernickety_--or useful monosyllables and penny pieces of popular speech like _blight_ and _nag_ and _fun_--have already found their way into standard English. But there are many others which might with advantage be given a larger currency. This process of dialectal regeneration, as it is called, has been greatly aided in the past by men of letters, who have given a literary standing to the useful and picturesque vocabulary of their unlettered neighbours, and thus helped to reinforce with vivid terms our somewhat abstract and faded standard speech. We owe, for instance, words like _lilt_ and _outcome_ to Carlyle; _croon_, _eerie_, _gloaming_ have become familiar to us from Burns's poems, and Sir Walter Scott added a large number of vivid local terms both to our written and our spoken language. In the great enrichment of the vocabulary of the romantic movement by means of words like _murk_, _gloaming_, _glamour_, _gruesome_, _eerie_, _eldritch_, _uncanny_, _warlock_, _wraith_--all of which were dialect or local words, we find a good example of the expressive power of dialect speech, and see how a standard language can be enriched by the use of popular sources. All members of our Society can help this process by collecting words from popular speech which are in their opinion worthy of a larger currency; they can use them themselves and call the attention of their friends to them, and if they are writers, they may be able, like the writers of the past, to give them a literary standing. If their suggestions are not accepted, no harm is done; while, if they make a happy hit and bring to public notice a popular term or idiom which the language needs and accepts, they have performed a service to our speech of no small importance. L.P.S. NOTES TO THE ABOVE _Role_. The italics and accent may be due to consciousness of _roll_. The French word will never make itself comfortable
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