ficient
force to prevent such a lapse. On the other hand, the highest and
most conventionalized style of archaic diction is--quite
characteristically--properly employed only in communications between an
anthropomorphic divinity and his subjects. Midway between these extremes
lies the everyday speech of leisure-class conversation and literature.

Elegant diction, whether in writing or speaking, is an effective means
of reputability. It is of moment to know with some precision what is
the degree of archaism conventionally required in speaking on any given
topic. Usage differs appreciably from the pulpit to the market-place;
the latter, as might be expected, admits the use of relatively new and
effective words and turns of expression, even by fastidious persons. A
discriminative avoidance of neologisms is honorific, not only because it
argues that time has been wasted in acquiring the obsolescent habit of
speech, but also as showing that the speaker has from infancy habitually
associated with persons who have been familiar with the obsolescent
idiom. It thereby goes to show his leisure-class antecedents. Great
purity of speech is presumptive evidence of several lives spent in other
than vulgarly useful occupations; although its evidence is by no means
entirely conclusive to this point.

As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found,
outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English
language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying
and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are
possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English
orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability
under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and
ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to
acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest
test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is
indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.

On this head of purity of speech, as at other points where a
conventional usage rests on the canons of archaism and waste, the
spokesmen for the usage instinctively take an apologetic attitude. It
is contended, in substance, that a punctilious use of ancient and
accredited locutions will serve to convey thought more adequately and
more precisely than would be the straightforward use of the latest form
of spoken Engli