Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/176

 words tends to contaminate it, then its purity must be limited to the paradoxical sense of its pure contamination.

The English-speaking people, as every other more or less, has found it interesting and convenient to borrow from abroad. Intellectual and material resources always have been exchanged with profit. Each importation fetches with it its own vocabulary. It is economical to accept one with the other. At all times this has been the rule of practice. The borrowing of abstract conceptions has proceeded after the same fashion. In brief, that which has been found worthy in any epoch by any people has been appropriated for the benefit of mankind at all succeeding times.

Moreover, the practice of borrowing words is governed by their usefulness rather than by pride in their kinship. That is common sense. A farmer needing a field-harrow will not borrow the model of a garden-rake. The same applies to all classes of words whether artistic, scientific, and so forth.