cast, and to take a liberty with technical language is a crime
against the clearness, precision, and beauty of perfected speech.

An anchor is a forged piece of iron, admirably adapted to its end,
and technical language is an instrument wrought into perfection by
ages of experience, a flawless thing for its purpose. An anchor of
yesterday (because nowadays there are contrivances like mushrooms
and things like claws, of no particular expression or shape--just
hooks)--an anchor of yesterday is in its way a most efficient
instrument. To its perfection its size bears witness, for there is
no other appliance so small for the great work it has to do. Look
at the anchors hanging from the cat-heads of a big ship! How tiny
they are in proportion to the great size of the hull! Were they
made of gold they would look like trinkets, like ornamental toys,
no bigger in proportion than a jewelled drop in a woman's ear. And
yet upon them will depend, more than once, the very life of the
ship.

An anchor is forged and fashioned for faithfulness; give it ground
that it can bite, and it will hold till the cable parts, and then,
whatever may afterwards befall its ship, that anchor is "lost."
The honest, rough piece of iron, so simple in appearance, has more
parts than the human body has limbs: the ring, the stock, the
crown, the flukes, the palms, the shank. All this, according to
the journalist, is "cast" when a ship arriving at an anchorage is
brought up.

This insistence in using the odious word arises from the fact that
a particularly benighted landsman must imagine the act of anchoring
as a process of throwing something overboard, whereas the anchor