Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/347

Rh "bos'n," "God be with, you!" to "Good-by!" and in the slang which in portions of the United States has begun to dwarf "How do you do?" into "Howdy?"

There is abundant scope for economy in all the forms of literary expression. Not only do we avoid as far as possible redundant elements, we also choose words calculated to convey our meaning with the minimum of effort on the part of the reader or listener. Where our end is simply that of intelligibility, as in the case of scientific statement, we choose words as simple and as expressive as possible; where to the end of intelligibility are added the ends of style, we employ words more ornate and picturesque in their character. In most prose compositions we are satisfied if we succeed in conveying our meaning; in most poetical compositions we seek, in addition to the end of intelligibility, to produce emotional excitement, to call the imagination into powerful activity, and to give rise to various pleasing effects, such as those of rhyme and alliteration. But whatever are our ends in composition, and however multifarious they may be, we always strive to reach them in the completest way and with the least possible demand upon the attention of the persons whom we are addressing. The sparing use of metaphor and parenthesis, the placing of the stronger epithets after instead of before the weaker, the avoidance of long and involved sentences, the care taken not to repeat words already used instead of their synonyms, the provision for variety which excludes monotony both of thought and of style, the observance of a best arrangement for the words in a sentence, the choice of particular material for the various paragraphs of a composition, and the construction of the links by which unity is secured for the whole treatment—all this is ordered, as far as is possible in each individual case, so as to produce a maximum of effect with a minimum of material.

How intolerant men are of speech elements unnecessary to intelligibility is shown by the drift of the educated and uneducated alike toward a phonetic spelling by the gradual doing away with inversion in both word and sentence, and by the growing tendency to use adjectives as adverbs, to discard subtleties like the subjunctive, and break down the well-established distinction between "shall" and "will." The economy which has taken place in the domain of grammatical forms is shown both in their gradual acquirement as means to the increased intelligibility of speech, and in the haste with which the mind, no longer needing them, hastened to discard the scaffolding of the structure which with their aid it had built up. The enormous gain which has been secured by the dropping of inflection may be appreciated somewhat by reference to the clumsy paraphernalia of such undeveloped languages as Zulu, in which, as translated by Dr. Bleek,