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The reader, I hope, will not think me either pedantic or supercilious if I insist that no word is more misused by the newspapers, indeed by the whole modern world, than this word statesmanship. It is a word of which the antonym is drifting. It signifies steersmanship, and implies control, guidance, direction, and, obviously, foresight.

"I was in search of an antonym and now they've driven it out of my memory." I politely offered my sympathy for her loss. "Did you ever see such misbehaved children?" she asked casually and impersonally as she calmly surveyed the free-for-all fight. "Children always misbehave before company," I remarked propitiatingly. "Of course they know better."

"Why no, they don't!" she declared, looking at me in surprise, "they " At this instant the errant antonym evidently flashed upon her mental vision and her pencil hastened to record it and then flew on at lightning speed. I was about to try to make an escape when a momentary cessation of hostilities was caused by the entrance of a moth-eaten, abstracted-looking man.

The term and its antonym were maintained by Linnaeus with the same sense, but with restricted application, in the names of the orders of his class Didynamia. Its use with any approach to its modern scope only became possible after Robert Brown had established in 1827 the existence of truly naked seeds in the Cycadeae and Coniferae, entitling them to be correctly called Gymnosperms.

A subtle philologist, M. Paul Ackermann, has shown, using the French language as an illustration, that, since every word in a language has its opposite, or, as the author calls it, its antonym, the entire vocabulary might be arranged in couples, forming a vast dualistic system. By Paul Ackermann.