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Take up the body.

2 Cit. Go, fetch fire.

4 Cit. Pluck down forms, windows, anything.

(Exeunt Citizens with the body)

Ant. Now let it work: Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt!

RUSSELL'S WORD PICTURE OF WENDELL PHILLIPS

Charles Edward Russell in his "Story of Wendell Phillips," gives us this vivid word picture: "Fifty or sixty years ago, in the United States of America this was a common spectacle:

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A public hall crowded to its limits with shouting, gesticulating men and women, most of them passionately angry. On the platform, a tall, grave, handsome man patiently waiting for a chance to be heard; without bravado and without concern he stands and waits. Part of the audience desires to drown his voice in clamor; and part threatens his life.

"He waits. Presently, a lull comes in the rioting storm of noise. Instantly he shoots into the opening a shining arrow of a sentence, compact, barbed and singing as it flies. At the sound of it, uproar doubles. He waits, standing like an archer with bow drawn. At the next lull, almost before the crowd is aware, he has loosened two of his burning shafts; at the next, three; at the next, the clamor dies away and friends and foes stand under the charm of a silver voice that rings forth one fascinating period after another. Hostile forces cease to contend on the floor. After a moment or two comes an involuntary ripple of applause. Before long the whole rapt audience is cheering. At the end of two hours it thinks the man may have been speaking ten minutes. He bows and leaves the platform amid thundering cheers and sown behind him are conviction and unperishing seeds of thought."

CHAPTER VIII

A PRACTICAL VOCABULARY METHOD

An author's vocabulary is of two kinds, latent and dynamic! latent-those words he understands; dynamic-those he can readily use. Every intelligent man knows all the words he needs but he may not have them all ready for active service. The problem of literary Diction consists in turning the latent into the Dynamic.

-PROFESSOR ALBERT HANCOCK.

"WORDS-Words-Words!" Plenty of them for everybody-over one hundred and forty thousand in our Dictionaries-over fifteen thousand good usable words available without using any long words or technical terms,-yet the average person has less than one thousand in his working vocabulary. Think of it! less than a thousand! not enough to "conceal" very much thought, or reveal it either. Do not misunderstand me; when I say "less than one thousand in his working vocabulary," I do not mean that the average person does not understand the meaning of more words-I mean that he is unable to use them in his daily speech. When you are making a talk or dictating a letter and you need a particular word to express a particular thought, is it there, right on the top of your mind and the tip of your tongue, ready for instant use? That's the test! If not, it is not in your working vocabulary.

The need of larger and more discriminating vocabularies is almost universal. Every man; yes-and every woman needs more words for the sake of fluency and clearness in practical speaking. Strange as it

may seem, the best authorities hold that women have even smaller vocabularies than men. But as one student remarked, "That may be true, but just think of the turn-over."

The paramount requirement of good diction for the public speaker is that it should be fitting-fitting for the speaker, for his audience, and for his subject. The speaker should not attempt to use big words and high sounding phrases which are evidently beyond his experience; he should not use language which is not easily intelligible to his hearers, nor indulge in phraseology not in keeping with his subject. In his effort to increase his vocabulary the student must not place words ahead of ideas or be betrayed into a mere cleverness of rhetorical flourishes. Remember, that the words are only instruments, and that ideas must never be subjugated to language.

True eloquence does not consist in words. They are only a means of conveying eloquence. Henry Ward Beecher had this in mind when he exclaimed, "When I get into the full stride of my speech and on fire with my message-if the English language gets in my way it doesn't stand any show on earth."

The grave danger, however, lies in the other direction. Where we find one who gives too much attention to diction, we find thousands who are utterly lacking in the use of concise forceful English, and pitifully limited in their command of words.

This is a handicap which hampers the adequate expression of thought; obscures the finer shades of meaning, and at the same time cripples the effectiveness of the spoken word. Regular and intelligent use of an up-to-date unabridged dictionary is imperative for

the student who wishes to eliminate such a handicap. Without this aid he may find himself in the position of Mrs. Malaprop who said, "I've been declining on the sofa pursuing the dictionary.”

LACK OF WORDS SPOILS DELIVERY

Not only does poor diction obscure the thought, but many of the worst faults in delivery can be traced directly to lack of words on the part of the speaker. In listening to thousands of beginners I have observed that in a great many cases the hesitation and jerkiness of their delivery was due to this cause. They had the thought. The idea was there, but the words to express it were lacking. This groping for words or stumbling over them utterly ruins delivery. Other students have the fault of overworking certain words in their vocabulary. They use these words over and over again without any discriminating sense of the exact meaning or shades of thought. We all know the man who describes everything from an auto to an overture with the stock phrase "She's a peach" and his feminine counterpart who classes everything from earth to Heaven either as "perfectly grand" or "perfectly awful." Poverty-stricken vocabularies, meager, pinched, starved diction-these are the handicaps which mar so many talks.

Realizing, then, the great need for better vocabularies, let us turn our earnest attention to a practical way to meet this need. Let us keep in mind that words are indeed the tools with which we carve out our forms of thought. The speaker's message must be conveyed to his fellow-men through the medium of words; wisely chosen, well spoken.

THE SPOKEN WORD IS VITALIZED BY PERSONALITY Again, we find the statement that words are but the dead forms of thought. But this does not apply to the spoken word. It is the privilege of the speaker to vitalize these dead forms of thought with his personality, and breathe into them the breath of life. Then do words become of tremendous importance, messengers of great tidings, messengers of all the varied thoughts and emotions that sweep the human brain. Was it not Browning who said, "Words are colors rightly laid"? He was right, but how few there are who can "rightly lay" them or blend the tone color to paint word pictures that can never fade!

"Oh, a word is a gem, or a stone or a song
Or a flame, or a two-edged sword
Or a rose in bloom or a sweet perfume
Or a drop of gall, is a word."

We have twenty-six letters in our alphabet. The number is limited. Out of these twenty-six you must build all your combinations. One man takes them and the best he can do is to build a thousand combinations, but his neighbor takes the same twenty-six, and works out ten thousand combinations. How do you handle the sacred twenty-six? Do you use the same skill that you use in chess or bridge? After all, this study of words is a fascinating game. It requires knowledge, judgment, skill, and imagination. If you want to play the game, learn the rules.

HOW TO INCREASE YOUR VOCABULARY

Here is a practical method for developing a large and discriminating vocabulary-a method that will give you many tools to work with a method that will

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