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But to know how to use a vocabulary is of even more importance than to possess one. Indeed, merely to possess a vocabulary without the ability to weave the words into accurate, characterized designs on an effective background is ruinous to the success of any talker or writer. To employ an extensive vocabulary riotously is worse than to own none. When the poet Keats wrote those well-known lines,
He got rid of his police duties when he became a professor, but he still studied the pupils as carefully as he used once to watch them, and learned to read character with a skill which might have fitted him for governing men instead of adolescents. But he loved quiet and he dreaded mingling with the brawlers of the market-place, whose stock in trade is a voice and a vocabulary.
But on one of these long, hot mornings when the heat seemed to stream in as from a furnace at the window and even the flies buzzed languidly, the Angel was seized with another idea for passing time. Her vocabulary of Tenement vernacular was growing too, and she chattered unceasingly. "C'rew, didn't a fink Angel might go find her mamma?" she demanded on this particular morning.
They yelled with pleasure, bestowed upon us all the terms of adulation until they exhausted their vocabulary, and blew their elephants' tusks until I confess I was compelled to stuff my fingers into my ears, fearing deafness. "Lead us on, O our lord the prince!" they cried. "Let us go forward.
"Mistress, fair mistress," he was sighing, and murmuring in her ear, "the most beautiful and gracious thing on God's earth, when I hold you pressed thus against my beating heart ..." Apparently his feelings were too deep to be expressed in the words of his own vocabulary, for he paused a while, sighed audibly, and then asked anxiously: "You do hear my heart beating, mistress, do you not?"
They simply can't do it. If they talk at all on such occasions they draw from the same vocabulary that they use every day, and muddle up their words and ideas a little more, that's all." Did you ever do that and listen to the words of grief and despair as they flowed spontaneously from her lips?" "I never did," said Dawe. "Did you?" "But I can well imagine what she would say."
Billy Breen was found by Geordie late in the afternoon in his own old and deserted shack, breathing heavily, covered up in his filthy, mouldering bed-clothes, with a half-empty bottle of whisky at his side. Geordie's grief and rage were beyond even his Scotch control. He spoke few words, but these were of such concentrated vehemence that no one felt the need of Abe's assistance in vocabulary.
As a child I could speak French as easily as English, and even after eight years of French lessons at school, my French was still tucked away in some corner of my head; but I had, of course, only a child's vocabulary, sufficient for a child's simple wants. Under Madame Ducros' skilful tuition I soon began to acquire an adult vocabulary, and it became no effort to me whatever to talk.
He got rid of his police duties when he became a professor, but he still studied the pupils as carefully as he used once to watch them, and learned to read character with a skill which might have fitted him for governing men instead of adolescents. But he loved quiet and he dreaded mingling with the brawlers of the market-place, whose stock in trade is a voice and a vocabulary.
In the Chinook vocabulary, which was originally the trade language of all the tribes employed by the Hudson Bay Company in collecting furs, most of the words resemble in sound the objects they represent. For example, a wagon in Chinook is chick-chick, a clock is ding-ding, a crow is kaw-kaw, a duck, quack-quack, a laugh, tee-hee; the heart is tum-tum, and a talk or speech or sermon, wah-wah.
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