Page:Ralcy H. Bell - The Mystery of Words (1924).pdf/182

 a reasonable middle ground. The correct use of words may be encouraged while an over-critical, or finical disposition toward the subject, may be scouted with reason. There never is any occasion to make mountains of mole-hills. The broad view can not take note of insignificant detail and immaterial defects, both which may be remedied without militant strictures or the attempt to give elementary instruction to such a mature and sturdy growth as our mother-tongue.

All have seen valiant knights of speech hurl with fine scorn and mighty ignorance their barbed and glittering spears; we have heard them revel in sarcasm and chuckle at their own wit; in a paragraph, we have known them to dispose of an entire subject with all its relations and roots running back through centuries of history; we have seen them armored in shining brass and barricaded behind epigrams; we have encountered their irrefutable sneers; we have heard them assert, in effect, that if a word meant something in an