circle, slang may serve; just as, between friends, silence may do
the work of talk. There are few families, or groups of familiars,
that have not some small coinage of this token-money, issued and
accepted by affection, passing current only within those narrow and
privileged boundaries. This wealth is of no avail to the
travelling mind, save as a memorial of home, nor is its material
such "as, buried once, men want dug up again." A few happy words
and phrases, promoted, for some accidental fitness, to the wider
world of letters, are all that reach posterity; the rest pass into
oblivion with the other perishables of the age.

A profusion of words used in an ephemeral slang sense is evidence,
then, that the writer addresses himself merely to the uneducated
and thoughtless of his own day; the revival of bygone meanings, on
the other hand, and an archaic turn given to language is the mark
rather of authors who are ambitious of a hearing from more than one
age. The accretions of time bring round a word many reputable
meanings, of which the oldest is like to be the deepest in grain.
It is a counsel of perfection--some will say, of vainglorious
pedantry--but that shaft flies furthest which is drawn to the head,
and he who desires to be understood in the twenty-fourth century
will not be careless of the meanings that his words inherit from
the fourteenth. To know them is of service, if only for the
piquancy of avoiding them. But many times they cannot wisely be
avoided, and the auspices under which a word began its career when
first it was imported from the French or Latin overshadow it and
haunt it to the end.

Popular modern usage will often rob common words, like "nice,"
"quaint," or "silly," of all flavour of their origin, as if it were