undered in thought. Nor is it hard to perceive
why this process should be the more frequent. Men are first struck with
the likenesses between those things which are presented to them, with
their points of resemblance; on the strength of which they bracket them
under a common term. Further acquaintance reveals their points of
unlikeness, the real dissimilarities which lurk under superficial
resemblances, the need therefore of a different notation for objects
which are essentially different. It is comparatively much rarer to
discover real likeness under what at first appeared as unlikeness; and
usually when a word moves forward, and from a specialty indicates now a
generality, it is not in obedience to any such discovery of the true
inner likeness of things,--the steps of successful generalizations being
marked and secured in other ways. But this widening of a word's meaning
is too often a result of those elements of disorganization and decay
which are at work in a language. Men forget a word's history and
etymology; its distinctive features are obliterated for them, with all
which attached it to some thought or fact which by right was its own.
Appropriated and restricted once to some striking specialty which it
vigorously set out, it can now be used in a wider, vaguer, more
unsettled way. It can be employed twenty times for once when it would
have been possible formerly to employ it. Yet this is not gain, but pure
loss. It has lost its place in the disciplined _army_ of words, and
become one of a loose and disorderly _mob_.

Let me instance the word 'preposterous'. It is now no longer of any
practical service at all in the language, being merely an ungraceful and
slipshod synonym for absurd. But restore and confine it to its old use;
let it designate that one peculiar branch of absurdity which it
designated once, namely the reversing of the true order of things, the
putting of the last first, and, by consequence, of the first last, and
of what excellent service the word would be capable. Thus it is
'preposterous', in the most accurate use of the word, to put the cart
before the horse, to expect wages before the work is done, to hang a man
first and try him afterwards; and in this strict and accurate sense the
word was always used by our elder writers{217}.

In like manner 'to prevaricate' was never employed by good writers of
the seventeenth century without nearer or more remote allusion to the
uses of the word in the R