Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
Carlyle's resolution to convey his meaning at all hazards, makes him seize the most effectual and sudden words in spite of usage and fashionable taste; and that, therefore, when he can get a brighter tint, a more expressive form, by means of some strange we must call it Carlylism; English, Scotch, German, Greek, Latin, French, Technical, Slang, American, or Lunar, or altogether superlunar, transcendental, and drawn from the eternal nowhere he uses it with a courage which might blast an academy of lexicographers into a Hades, void even of vocables....
Each of them takes its name from one of the States of the Union names which, as Stevenson long ago pointed out, form an unrivalled array of "sweet and sonorous vocables."
Despite Tertullian's curious, concise style full of ambiguous terms, resting on participles, clashing with oppositions, bristling with puns and witticisms, dappled with vocables culled from the juridical science and the language of the Fathers of the Greek Church, he now hardly ever opened the Apologetica and the Treatise on Patience.
Had I abandoned the sonorous south to associate with vocables so base? It was very cold the other day at Avignon, for though there was no mistral, it was raining as it rains in Provence, and the dampness had a terrible chill in it.
A man of vast dumb faculty; dumb, but fertile, deep; no end of ingenuities in the rough head of him: as much mother-wit, there, I often guess, as could be found in whole talking parliaments, spouting themselves away in vocables and eloquent wind! A man of dreadful impetuosity withal.
To such a length is this carried that when, as very frequently happens, the man rejoiced in the name of 'Fowl, 'Hat', 'Fire, 'Road, etc., in its Nicobarese equivalent, the use of these words is carefully eschewed for the future, not only as being the personal designation of the deceased, but even as the names of the common things they represent; the words die out of the language, and either new vocables are coined to express the thing intended, or a substitute for the disused word is found in other Nicobarese dialects or in some foreign tongue.
'Thou wilt do well to pick dexterously, he says, in his abridgment of the art of French poetry, 'and adopt to thy work the most expressive words in the dialects of our own France; there is no need to care whether the vocables are Gascon, or Poitevin, or Norman, or Mancese, or Lyonnese, or of other districts, provided that they are good, and properly express what thou wouldst say. Ronsard was too bold in extending his conquests over the classical languages; it was that exuberance of ideas, that effervescence of a genius not sufficiently master over its conceptions, which brought down upon him, in after times, the contempt of the writers who, in the seventeenth century, followed, with more wisdom and taste, the road which he had contributed to open.
No two characters being identical in any particular more than two faces are, no two descriptions, as drawn by his genius, could repeat many of the selfsame characterizing words. Each of his vocables thus became like each of the seven thousand constituents of a locomotive, which fits the one niche it was ordained to fill, but everywhere else is out of place, and even dislocated.
The child growing up learns, along with the vocables of his mother-tongue, that things which he would have believed to be different are, in important points, the same. Without any formal instruction, the language in which we grow up teaches us all the common philosophy of the age.
Such a theory of language would treat it as a necessary evil and would look forward hopefully to the extinction of literature, in which it would recognise nothing ideal. There is of course no reason to deprecate the use of vocables, or of any other material agency, to expedite affairs; but an art of speech, if it is to add any ultimate charm to life, has to supervene upon a mere code of signals.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking