The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-10-01

spoken tongues of today, and both of which are direct descendants of the magnificent Latin tongue.
 When you take up the dictionary, you see at once that certain words
 are derived from certain sources.
 word in common use may come from
 Latin or Greek, an Arabic, a leu tonic or from an Alglo- Saxon source.
 As rule the sonorous, reverberating and splendid words are derived from
 the dignified and strenuous Latin,
 which was the language of old Rome
 In the days when her eagles conquered the world
 Words derived from the Greek are
 often of honeyed sweetness and captivating music ana at the same
 time are extremely picturesque, a sin
 gle word In Greek often containing all that we would express in a phrase or
 sentence and bringing up to the initiated q scene full of color fit for 6 painters brush.
 Angio-Saxon words are usually terse. brief and full of pith. They are of- ten one-syllabled words The diction-
 ary will show you this.
 thoughtful writer has said Among the many ends which we may
 propose to ourselves in the study of
 language, there Is out one which is
 common and necessary to every man. l mean such a facility in comprehend ing and such skill in using his moth
 er-tongue that he can play well his
 part in the never-ceasing dialogue
 which. whether between the living and the living, or the living and the dead,
 whether breathed from the lips or fig
 ured with the pen, takes up so large part of the life of every one of us." A nice, exact and accurate use of
 words, the ability to choose the word
 that precisely fits the thought, can not be obtained by anyone who does not know the dictionary. For exam pie, to take familiar illustration, one hears a careless person say of a wooden building falling into ruin. Look at that dilapidated house. What a pity" But 1t is only a stone house
 that can be said, strictly speaking, to
 be dilapidated and in the very word there Is a picture of stones falling apart and mouldering In confusion. The man who would address an au- dience with success and shine in the reciprocal talk of the drawing groom or set a good example in speech 10 his chill dren must know something of the real meaning of words.
 Apart from this. if one were stranded in a country inn. with no other book than the dictionary wherewith to while away the time, he might find no little satisfaction in studying what Edmund
 Rowland Siu happily called the clang- tint of words. There are words which carry the force of blows. There are
 words which the ring of clashing steel. There are other words which sound like bugles blowing upon the blast R. L. stevenson was a postmaster in the use of living words which clothed his fervent thought Rudyard Kip ling has the same happy magic iE find ing the exact word and the exact phrase.
 Take some words of everyday use, such as cold. frigid. chill; or bot, arid | torrid. At once each word peculiarly
 suggests the condition 1t describes l Take the word rabhle. defined in the dictionary as "a crawling, disorderly mob or crowd" This one word comes | to us through the old Dutch, where il means to gabble; through the German where 1t means to prattle foolishly i through the Swiss, where 1t means an uproar; through the Latin, where fl means rave; through the Gaelic. where
 1t means a tumultuous crowd of rough ! or low people. One little common