Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 122.djvu/69

Rh which we find them in the dictionary, have much the function that sand has for the locomotive: they enable the wheels of thought to clutch the track of conversation; but they are as far from being the soul of intercourse as the sand is from being the movement of the train.

The soul of intercourse in the intimacies of life is much more a matter of action and music than it is of language. The parents glance across the table at each other—and suddenly the daughter's face turns crimson. The brother's eye turns by an imperceptible degree—and presto! the sister passes him the salt. The baby's under-lip begins to go down—and like a flash the mother has leaped into the breach. 'Hm,' says the husband as he tastes the soup; and though the sound means nothing to the outsider, to the wife it speaks volumes. 'No,' says the maiden to the youth; and by some alchemy of tone the familiar monosyllable reverses its accepted meaning. 'Oh!' cries the child as she receives the apple; and that 'oh' says, 'Thank you' as unmistakably as her tardily added, 'Thank you, Mrs. Jones,' says, 'I'm remembering to say what mother told me.'

Thus does the human voice play the old witch with the dictionary. Listen to words and you will hear words; listen to voices and you will hear reality.

People complain of the paucity of vocabulary in the American home. No doubt the American home is poverty-stricken enough intellectually; but its paucity of vocabulary is no proof of the fact. Time enough to worry when that vocabulary begins expanding. The recent vogue of the word 'some' as an adjective, in a sense for which there is absolutely no synonym in the dictionary, has been the despair of many a parent and pedagogue. 'The language is being pauperized,' they cry. Nonsense. It would be nearer the mark to say it is being vitalized. Watch a healthy schoolboy when he tells you he has just come from 'some' ball-game, and you will perceive that the offending word has ceased to be a mere linguistic sign and has become a kinetic current within the body, a movement of the spirit. Some word, it! A true super-word, in fact. Philosophize on it,—and on the kindred subject of slang,—and you may discover why, when a man's vocabulary begins to expand, his powers of expression are generally on the wane.

Genuine expressiveness, involving, as it does, the whole personality, constantly reveals how small a part words have in human communication. When Salvini played Othello in this country, scores of people admitted after seeing him that they completely forgot during the performance the fact that he was speaking in one language—of which most of them understood not a word—while his company was speaking in another. On the day of Pentecost, we are told, men uttered themselves in a Babel of tongues, but each heard and understood in the tongue in which he was born. Babies likewise speak a universal language. And children just learning to talk perform miracles of expression with their slender stock of verbal raw material quite out of the range of an adult with the entire Oxford Dictionary on the tip of his tongue. And yet this very adult, when he succeeds in forgetting his dictionary, catches something of that power which children and geniuses possess more fully. Every man, for example, has a hundred ways of uttering his wife's name, each of which is a masterpiece of vocal shorthand. And the wife reciprocates. The amount of conversation that can be carried on with a pittance of verbal capital is astonishing. Study yourself, gentle reader, from this angle,