Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/178

156 changes a language may undergo, they must all be shared in by the whole community. The idiosyncrasies, the sharp angles and jutting corners, of every man's idiom must be worn off by attrition against those with which it comes in contact in the ordinary intercourse of life, that the common tongue may become a rounded unit. This does not imply an absolute identity of dialect, down to the smallest details, among all the constituent members of a community; within certain limits—which, though not strictly definable, are sufficiently distinct and coercive to answer their practical purpose perfectly well—each one may be as original as he pleases: he may push his oddity and obscurity to the very verge of the whimsical and the incomprehensible—or even beyond it, if he do not mind being misunderstood and laughed at; if his sense of his own individuality be so exaggerated that he is a whole community, a world, to himself. Nor must the word community, as used with reference to language, be taken in a too restricted or definite sense. It has various degrees of extension, and bounds within bounds: the same person may belong to more than one community, using in each a different idiom. For instance: I have, as we may suppose, a kind of home dialect, containing a certain proportion of baby-talk, and a larger of favourite colloquialisms, which would sound a little queerly, if they were not unintelligible, to any one outside of my family circle; as an artisan, pursuing a special branch of manufacture or trade, or as one engaged in a particular profession, or study, or department of art, I am a member of another community, speaking a language to some extent peculiar, and which would be understood neither by my wife and children nor by the majority of speakers of English. Thus, I may have dived deep into the mysteries of some scheme of transcendental philosophy, or searched and pondered the ultimate physical constitution of atoms; and, if I should discourse to a general audience of that which to me is full of profoundest significance and interest, while one out of twenty, perhaps, would follow me with admiring appreciation, to the other nineteen I should seem an incomprehensible ranter. But even as a general speaker of English,