Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/119

Rh speech, out of which their roots are nourished. For they are nothing in themselves. Hobbes has well said, "Words are the counters of wise men, but the money of fools." Their virtue lies in previous accretions of thought which they vivify by assimilation. It is in respect of the associations they recall that the loss of them affects the capacity for finding pleasure in language. The great weakness of our educational system is its academic and analytic character. For centuries the schoolboy has studied the mechanism of language, not the expression of human life and interests, with nose over printed text and finger in lexicon. The ear and the imagination have not worked in unison so as to visualise the situation and give it its place in the world of fact. The effect is to fill our dictionaries with words which reveal their content to the logician and scholar. The corrective to this lies in the recognition of the historic mother-tongue. Created by needs which were lying to hand, its diction is suggestive of the concrete representation that is of the essence of poetry. It is a healthy sign of a national literature when it keeps in touch with its vernacular as based on natural observation, humour, and pathos. Better this than to strain after the striking or familiar by the use of coterie slang. The dramatic instincts of Mr. Kipling seem to have imposed a diction which shocks the more punctilious, but even so good a stylist as Mr. Augustine Birrell quite needlessly offends good taste when he speaks of certain people's scholarship being "no great shakes," or tells us that "a vast number of people do not care a rap about reading."

The foregoing is an attempt to exploit a subject which may fairly be said to have escaped learned discussion, though much of the matter of it is part of our everyday experience. Extended observation might not only widen the view here outlined, but fill up many gaps.

The word dialect has been coined for us by those early Greek grammarians who endeavoured to present their matchless literature and language to the duller understandings of their Roman conquerors. They thus differentiated the Ionic,