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I don't expect to make a silver-tongued orator out of you, Flopper, and perhaps not even a purist but I hope to eradicate a few minor touches of Bad Land vernacular from your vocabulary." "I've gotcher swipe me!" grinned the Flopper. "Me at school! Say, wouldn't that put a smile on de maps of de harness bulls, an' de dips, an' de lags doin' spaces up de river!"
"Me come back!" he exclaimed in gutteral English, using about half of his foreign vocabulary. "I see you did," answered Professor Bumper in the man's own tongue. "Glad to see you. Is everything all right?" "All right," was the answer. "These Indians will take you where you want to go, and will not leave you as Jacinto did."
His subjects ought not to look him in the face; they prostrate themselves before him when he passes, and appear before him on their knees, their elbows resting on the ground." There is a special language devoted to his sacred person and attributes, and it must be used by all who speak to or of him. Even the natives have difficulty in mastering this peculiar vocabulary.
Possibly it was my vocabulary, which was consistent with my vocation, together with my ungainly appearance, that differentiated me from my partners. George Edwards was neat in appearance, had a great fund of Western stories and experiences, and the two of us were constantly being importuned for incidents of a frontier nature.
And De Quincey speaks of him as "the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet existed amongst men." One is sometimes tempted to wish that the superlative could be abolished, or its use allowed only to old experts. What are men to do when they get to heaven, after having exhausted their vocabulary of admiration on earth?
But my point is that the Free Press must have had already a profound effect for its mere vocabulary to have sunk in thus, and to have spread so widely in the face of the rigid boycott to which it is subjected. Much more important than this clearly applicable test of vocabulary is the more general and less measurable test of programmes and news.
The men that do not know the danger are the rashest men, and I have several times ventured to make this suggestion to the men about me in both arms of the service. Please leave out of your vocabulary altogether the word "prudent." Do not stop to think about what is prudent for a moment.
Of course the hieroglyphs, the written words, run into hundreds of thousands; for the literature, you have a vocabulary indeed. But you see that the spoken language depends, to express its meaning, upon a different kind of elements from those all our languages depend on.
Major Davies also gives some new information concerning this hill people, and is generally correct in what he says; but in his, as in all the books which touch upon the subject, the language tests vary considerably. In Chao-t'ong and the surrounding districts, for instance, the traveler would be unable to make any progress with the vocabulary which the Major has compiled.
The whole trouble was at once revealed: the oxen had been broken and trained by a man who, when they were in a pinch, had encouraged them by his frontier vocabulary, and they could not realize what was expected of them under extraordinary conditions until they heard familiar and possibly profanely urgent phrases.
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