public notice a popular term or idiom which the language needs and
accepts, they have performed a service to our speech of no small
importance.

L.P.S.


NOTES TO THE ABOVE

_Rôle_. The italics and accent may be due to consciousness of _roll_. The
French word will never make itself comfortable in English if it is
homophonous with _roll_.

_Timbre_. This word is in a peculiar condition. In the French it has very
various significations, but has come to be adopted in music and acoustics
to connote the quality of a musical sound independent of its pitch and
loudness, a quality derived from the harmonics which the fundamental note
intensifies, and that depends on the special form of the instrument. The
article _Clang_ in the Oxford Dictionary quotes Professor Tyndall
regretting that we have no word for this meaning, and suggesting that we
should imitate the awkward German _klang-farbe_. We have no word unless we
forcibly deprive _clangour_ of its noisy associations. We generally use
_timbre_ in italics and pronounce it as French; and since the word is used
only by musicians this does not cause much inconvenience to them, but it
is because of its being an unenglish word that it is confined to
specialists: and truly if it were an English word the quality which it
denotes would be spoken of more frequently, and perhaps be even more
differentiated and recognized, though it is well known to every child. Now
how should this word be Englished? Is the spelling or the pronunciation to
stand? The English pronunciation of the letters of _timbre_ is forbidden