Hear, hear, Hildegarde!You all remember how, in fairy stories, the young goatherd or shepherd who loves the princess and seeks to many her is usually asked, among other difficult deeds, to guess some puzzling conundrum.
Suppose this were the conundrum that was asked you:
What is that valuable possession which, the greater the number of people who own it, the more valuable it becomes, and the more you use it the more you have it? It is at once the ugliest and the most beautiful thing. It is your enemy's surest weapon and your friend's finest offering. Good and Evil both find it their greatest help. Although it is as invisible as air, it has color, form, and substance. Joy and grief live in it, yet it itself knows neither. Though it is eternal, it is always changing. Though you could not get on without it, it is useful to you only because it is useful to others. The wise man and the fool both depend on it.
After thinking a minute or two you step up boldly to the foot of the throne where the king is waiting for your answer, feeling very sure he has you stumped. And you reply:
"Nothing, Sire, could be simpler. The answer is Language."
And the king has to admit you are right, while the princess smiles upon you happily.
Language, speech. Where should we be without it? With the animals. And there are some who assert that even animals and birds have at least some rudimentary form of speech to help them along in the business of living.
But language, though it is so important, so precious, is also so common that we fall into the habit of treating it rather badly, of neglecting it, of failing altogether to make it as useful or as beautiful for ourselves as we should. We have no other means of really understanding anything and everything, nor of getting ourselves understood, than through and by language. There are hundreds of thousands of words waiting for us to use them, each expressing some tiny portion or some immense portion of thought or feeling or ideas. And we leave many and many of these words idle all our lives long, and are just so much the poorer, just so much less our full selves, by that lack.
Think of the power of words to touch, to inspire! Think of Lincoln's great Gettysburg Address, and what that simple choice and arrangement of words has meant to us all. Suppose he had been content to go through life with a few slang phrases, with slipshod grammar and ill-chosen words that did not really translate his thought. How much poorer we should all have been: how much that makes us Americans we should have lost!
The English language is one of the very great things of the world. It is so rich that not all the riches of Solomon's mines can equal it. Vou can dig and dig in that great mine of words and continue to bring up priceless wealth—wealth that grows with use, wealth that adds to your own worth, to the world's worth, and remains as rich as it was.
Sensible people hold a contempt for misers, and rightly enough. A man who will not use his gold to get for himself the lovely and noble things of life, who exists in poverty, dirt, and distress rather than touch the little pieces of money that are only worth anything as you change them to something quite different from themselves, that man is not to be envied. And yet there are many of use who are misers when it comes to language. We use only the nearest, poorest bits that can get us along, half-starved, as it were, amid plenty.
Ideas only become real as you put them into words. If you don't know the right words, the words that are going to express exactly what you have in your mind, then your idea dies inside you. It never reaches real life. You are part dumb. And it is a pity to be at all dumb, when you have speech and language as your instruments, ready to serve you so fully.
Many of us get into the way of using a few easy phrases or slang expressions for pretty much all we say. Of course, this is terribly tiresome to other people, and then it shuts your mind up in a sort of box, so small that it only just gives it breathing-space, keeps it half stifled. We have at times seen people struggling for words to express some thought or emotion much as they might struggle for breath in a room where there was not sufficient oxygen. But the words are there—only there has never been an attempt made by the sufferer to make them his.
Vulgar, cheap, and careless language will cheapen, vulgarize, and dissipate the mind. For language has a strange power. You would hardly believe that words could affect human beings, could alter and coerce them, but they can. You live among words every moment of your life. Even in silence, words are forming inside your brain, even in sleep they exist for you. If they are silly or common, they will master you in time. They are the shells of ideas, and ideas flow into and fill them, take their shape. If you use only the poor and wretched words, your ideas will finally fit themselves to these.
The French people have a passionate love of their language. Even little children can express themselves beautifully and fully, even the simplest sort of folk in the villages and rural communities take pleasure in studying words and in finding the right word for what they want to say. I know one old housepainter in a tiny French village who used to talk with me about the controversies regarding a new word in the French Academy, and he was deeply interested in the decision as to whether some such word was really worth taking into the language and making a part of it, or as to whether it should be thrown out as unnecessary or stupid or inexpressive.
"A good clear word is like a good clear act," he would say. "You can tell a man by the words he uses as well as by the things he does."
The English language is quite as magnificent as the French; in some ways it is even richer and more expressive. You ought to love it. If you study it at all, you will love it. It has a music as strong and sweet as a finely played symphony; it has shades of meaning so delicate that they escape anything but the very closest attention, just as the feathers on a butterfly's wing are lost to anything but the microscope. Our language has a force and a directness as powerful as the stroke of a sledge-hammer, and yet there are little dear words in it that will make a baby smile, smiling words to answer that baby with when it smiles.
Slang is very good in its way, and if you use it with sense, and to help, not to crowd out, legitimate words, it is often amusing and hits the bull's-eye with astonishing success. One of the ways a language grows is by slang, and slang that is not merely stupid and meaningless is going, before long, to be adopted right into the language as a real word.
But to use a slang term to express everything you want to express, tq answer virtually every question with "I 11 say so," for instance, is a silly, tiresome thing to do. An expression like that gets stale so soon, and it makes your mind seem stale, too. It really does keep you from thinking, from being yourself. It is just the wearisome copy of something some one else said: it has no meaning. It is lazy, slovenly.
Our country is becoming, even more than it has long been, the meeting-ground for innumerable foreigners, who come here to make America their future home. They do not speak our language, and as they have very little chance to learn it properly, they usually never speak more than a broken and distorted form of it. Their children will make it their own, but as they hear only a poor version of it at home, they must depend on outside sources to speak it well. Often these sources are pretty bad. The result is that in all our cities and in many of our rural districts you hear a very messy, badly pronounced, and ungrammatical English spoken. The beauty of the beautiful tongue is utterly lost. It is degraded and cheapened almost beyond recognition.
Now if we Americans do not care enough for this, our great possession, to guard and use it well, to pronounce it fitly, not sloppily, to speak it correctly and use it fully, who is going to care? You youngsters, who are growing up now, are the persons who must safeguard and develop and treasure our language. It is your splendid heritage, and as it is itself noble, so you should treat it nobly.
I think it was Longfellow who said that he found reading the dictionary as thrilling as reading a romance. It is wonderful to trace a word back to its origin and see how it has reached its full meaning, often through many changes. Curious, too, to see how some words drop out of the language without any good reason. And then the new words that have entered. Take electricity, for instance. Think of all the new words it brought along with it. And the same with the aeroplane, and flying as a profession instead of a dream. You read the history of a people in reading a dictionary, or at least a large part of its development.
Of course I don't imagine for a single moment that you are going to drop your story reading for the dictionary, but I just wanted to hint to you that words have a real life, a beginning and a growth, a history, and that this links up with ourselves in a way that is very interesting. Naturally, writers pay more attention to words than do other people, because words are their special stock in trade.
But you young folk owe your language allegiance and service. For your own sakes, because clear and correct and varied speech means a fit and fine expression of your thoughts, gives your brain a proper and satisfactory means of putting itself at your service, of reaching its full power. And also for the sake of your race and your country, that uses this wonderful language in its great work in the world. The English language is spoken more extensively than any other. It is a world instrument of enormous potency. It has drawn on many other tongues, ancient and modern, for its expansion, and is based on mighty foundations. It will continue to grow and will continue to spread over the world if it is given free opportunity in the future as in the past. But there must be some to love it and cherish it, to keep it pure, to speak it with distinction and accuracy. Grammar may seem dull when you study rules in a book, but grammar is a sort of skeleton, and unless it is straight and true, the whole body is deformed. Why should you be content to use a deformed thing when a little thought and trouble will put you in possession of something fair and strong?
Your language is part of your country; it is your country's voice. Be proud of both, love both. Be among those who really care, who care enough to give something of themselves, some of their time, some of their effort, to keep both country and language up to the mark. It is always, in the end. your joh. It is you who must do what is to be done, if any one is to do it, you yourself!
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