Page:The Craftsmanship of Writing.djvu/244

 has been formulated down to the present day than that old dictum of Quintillian: "Use only the newest of the old and the oldest of the new." We may, of course, assume in theory that no word is so obsolete that it may not under some special conditions be revived; no slang so recent as to be wholly barred out of print. D'Annunzio, the recognised master of modern Italian style, has ransacked the early writers for so many out-of-the-way words that some of his later prose can be more easily read by a college bred Anglo-Saxon with a fair knowledge of the language than by an equally intelligent Italian who does not happen to be well grounded in Latin and Greek. And in the opposite scale, we have Mr. Kipling, who fearlessly enriches our language with such words as he thinks it needs. Nevertheless, the safe norm lies in the simple, every-day vocabulary. A good craftsman can accomplish