es in the windpipe.

The yellowish waves of gas became more greenish in color as fresh
volumes poured out continually from the squat iron cylinders which
had now been raised and placed outside the trenches by the Germans.
The translucent flood flowed over the parapet, linking at once on
the inner side and forming vague, gauzy pools and backwaters, in
which men stood knee deep while the lighter gas was blown in their
faces over the parapet.

FAULTS IN DICTION. Since newspaper reporters and correspondents are
called upon day after day to write on similar events and to write at top
speed, they are prone to use the same words over and over again, without
making much of an effort to "find the one noun that best expresses the
idea, the one verb needed to give it life, and the one adjective to
qualify it." This tendency to use trite, general, "woolly" words instead
of fresh, concrete ones is not infrequently seen in special feature
stories written by newspaper workers. Every writer who aims to give to
his articles some distinction in style should guard against the danger
of writing what has aptly been termed "jargon." "To write jargon," says
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his book, "On the Art of Writing," "is to be
perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract
terms. So long as you prefer abstract words, which express other men's
summarized concepts of things, to concrete ones which lie as near as can
be reached to things themselves and are the first-hand material for your
thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers at second-hand. If your
language be jargon, your intellect, if not your whole character, will
almost certainly correspond. Where your mind should go straight, it will
dodge; the difficulties it should approach with a fair front and grip
with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or circumvent. For the
style is the man, and where a man's treasure is there his heart, and his
brain, and his writing, will be also."

FIGURES OF SPEECH. To most persons the term "figure of speech" suggests
such figures as metonymy and synecdoche, which they once learned to
define, but never thought of using voluntarily in their own writing.
Figures of speech are too often regarded as ornaments suited only to
poetry or poetical prose. With these popular notions in mind, a writer
for newspapers and magazines may quite naturally conclude that
figurative expressions have little or no p