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Updated: May 26, 2025
At his dim threshold I often questioned him, and the whole smithy always answered me. The sparks laughed in the coal, and syllables of metal fashioned a mysterious and profound language which moved me like the words of duty. And I experienced there almost the same feelings as in the home of the humble cobbler. One day the smith fell ill.
The only way to bring back English to a state of purity for it has been outraged by slang, imitation, technical expressions, a straining after long words, and a regular system of exaggeration is to speak simple words, using all necessary force and emphasis in the voice instead of in the number of syllables, saying what you mean by just the words that will convey the meaning.
These twenty-eight syllables may be clumsily interpreted: "At the mouth of the Yangtsze River, as the sun is about to sink, I look north toward Liao-Tung but do not see my home. The steam-whistle shrills several times on the boundless expanse where meet sky and earth. The steamer, floating gently like a hollow reed, sails out of the Middle Kingdom."
O stained prairie, O gallows, thirsty mob, knife, torch, revolver. Contumely, parochialism, the shortvision forever gone; and the long vision too, the eagle forgotten is the national bird, the great merging with the greater, so gained too late a vision and saw the hope that was despair. "I named the catalogue of states and the great syllables rolled from my tongue to echo silence.
Where the Ten Commandments have two hundred and fifty-nine words of one syllable, Professor March has only one hundred and ninety-four; over against the fifty two-syllable words in the Ten Commandments, Professor March has sixty-five; over against their six words of three syllables, he has thirty-five; over against their four words of four syllables, he uses eighteen; and while the Ten Commandments have no word longer than four syllables, Professor March needs five words of five syllables and two words of six syllables to express his ideas.
Alas, that love and poetry should be checked by anything so commonplace as syllables! Let wet yet, one can fit in the sense easily when the proper rhyme has been decided upon; and who knows but that Gifford, lying there in the grass, with the old lichen-covered step for a desk, might have written a sonnet or a madrigal which would have given him his heart's desire before the moon rose!
But, somehow, the bird, the animal, and the flowers were the same thing really one big simple thing. Only the point of view was different. "We've looked simply everywhere!" cried Judy. "Just look what we found!" Tim echoed. To Uncle Felix it seemed they said one and the same thing merely using one word in many syllables.
What a debauch of speeches, of unuttered conversations which no one heard but herself! Sometimes her lips would move as they do with people who have to spell out the syllables to themselves as they read so as to understand them. When her dreams left her she was happy and sad.
In the next place we may observe, that where the Words are not Monosyllables, we often make them so, as much as lies in our Power, by our Rapidity of Pronounciation; as it generally happens in most of our long Words which are derived from the Latin, where we contract the length of the Syllables that give them a grave and solemn Air in their own Language, to make them more proper for Dispatch, and more conformable to the Genius of our Tongue.
As a "livelier iris changes on the burnished dove," and the fancy of the young man turns lightly to thoughts of his pretty cousin, so the same renewing spirit touches the "silent singers," and they are no longer dumb; faintly they lisp the first syllables of the marvelous tale.
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