Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/146

 Language is at once physiological, physical, and psychological. Orthoëpy largely is physiological. Psychic phenomena transform and otherwise modify speech; and these phenomena are as active to-day as ever. Ceaselessly, intelligence and ignorance work side by side as a team in the modifying of our tongue. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, and quite paradoxically, they shape it into an engine more and more capable for its purposes. Ignorance and Wisdom are the two gods of destiny. The collective human will, a vast underlying, impersonal power, is a potent factor in this process: a factor that has been ignored and even denied by students of speech. This will everywhere is present, and ever busy changing, mutilating, repairing, and transforming language. Countless millions of efforts are made every day to express a little more clearly than language permits, those ideas which the mind seeks to utter. Millions of these efforts mutilate whilst trying to simplify grammar; millions combine to form the crude and sim-