Verbal Snobbery

Northern Advocate, 13 July 1938, Page 2

Verbal Snobbery

“Fine words butter no parsnips.” Agreed. And if there were no better use for dictionaries than to marshal battalions of well-dressed, words at our glib command, it would not be worth while to urge their study. The mere acquisition of words, to decorate our speech or writing, and enable us to make two words grow where one would do, is a thankless piece of shallow snobbery. The speaker who becomes intoxicated with the exuberance of his own verboisty probably disgusts his audience, or at least boros them stiff.

What Shakespeare made Polonius say of clothes holds true of words;— “Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy. But not express'd in fancy; rich not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man.” So words proclaim thoughts. And. as a man thinks, so he is, and so ho does. Carlyle notwithstanding, silence is not golden when we have something worth saying. By words we advance in the twin powers of thinking and expression. And no man has ever become a master of words who has not at some lime been the diligent student of a dictionary, and learned that a dictionary can be a good companion, a treasure house, and a lamp, no less upon the path of life than the paths of literature.

Do we so think about a dictionary? Has it not been, known for a man to say—“l want a cheap dictionary for my boy who is going to school tomprrovy?" And is it an unheard of thing that a man will give five, ten, or fifty pounds for a dog and hesitate about five or ten shillings for a dictionary? What value do we set upon our English heritage of language? How do we discharge the trust of handing it on richer than we received it rather than poorer, if we act ns though we wore more concerned about thoroughbred dogs th*m thoroughbred speech? The choice of a dictionary, then, somewhat like the choice of a wife, “is not to be ofitcrprlsed, nor taken in hand, unadvisably or lightly.” And as I’ve been asked, and as promised i week, some idea is now offered of what there is from which, to choose in the way of English dictionaries.