itself to the one task of placing at your disposal the means of adding to
your stock of words, of increasing your vocabulary.

It does not assume that you are a scholar, or try to make you one. To be
sure, it recognizes the ends of scholarship as worthy. It levies at every
turn upon the facts which scholarship has accumulated. But it demands of
you no technical equipment, nor leads you into any of those bypaths of
knowledge, alluring indeed, of which the benefits are not immediate. For
example, in Chapter V it forms into groups words etymologically akin to
each other. It does this for an end entirely practical--namely, that the
words you know may help you to understand the words you do not know. Did
it go farther--did it account for minor differences in these words by
showing that they sprang from related rather than identical originals, did
it explain how and how variously their forms have been modified in the
long process of their descent--it would pass beyond its strict utilitarian
bounds. This it refrains from doing. And thus everything it contains it
rigorously subjects to the test of serviceability. It helps you to bring
more and more words into workaday harness--to gain such mastery over them
that you can speak and write them with fluency, flexibility, precision,
and power. It enables you, in your use of words, to attain the readiness
and efficiency expected of a capable and cultivated man.

There are many ways of building a vocabulary, as there are many ways of
attaining and preserving health. Fanatics may insist that one should be
cultivated to the exclusion of the others, just as health-cranks may
declare that diet should be watched in complete disregard of recreation,
sanitation, exercise, the need for medicines, and one's mental attitude to
life. But the sum of human experience, rather than fanaticism, must
determine our procedure. Moreover experience has shown that the various
successful methods of bringing words under man's sway are not mutually