th
"moving pictures," or "motion pictures ") has a high potentiality
of acceptance.

[Footnote 1: H. L. Mencken in his suggestive book, _The American
Language_, sees in this upshoot of phrases indigenous to the
soil and the temper of the American people, and of grammatical
constructions also, symptoms of the increasing divergence of
the American from the English language. That there are a large
number of special expressions exclusively used in the United
States, and parts of the United States, that are not found in
use in England, goes without saying. Everyone knows that the
Englishman says "lift" where we say "elevator," "shop," where
we are likely to say "store." There are significant differences
to be found even in the casual expressions of American and
English newspapers. But it is doubtful whether the divergence
can go very far, in view of the constant intercommunication,
the rapidity of travel between the two countries, and the
promiscuous reading of English books in America, and American
books in England.]

LANGUAGE AS EMOTIONAL AND LOGICAL. Since language is
primarily useful as an instrument of communication, it should
ideally be a direct and clean-cut representation of experience.
It should be as unambiguous, and immediate, as telegraphy,
algebra, or shorthand. But language has two functions,
which interfere with one another. Words not only represent
logical relations; they provoke emotional responses. They
not only explicitly tell; they implicitly suggest. They are not
merely skeletons of thought; they are clothed with emotional
values. They are not, in consequence, transitive vehicles of
thought. Words should, from the standpoint of communication,
be mere signals to action, which should attract attention
only in so far as they are signals. They should be no more
regarded as things in themselves than is the green lamp which
signals a locomotive engineer to go ahead. They should be as
immediate signals to action as, at a race, the "Ready, set, go"
of the starter is to the runner. Yet this rarely happens in the
case of words. They frequently impede or mislead action by
arousing emotions irrelevant to their intellectual significance,
or provoke action on the basis of emotional associations rather
than on their merits, so to speak, as logical representations of
ideas.

To take an example: England, as an intellectual symbol,
may be said to be a name given to a small island bounded by
certain latitudes and