and will have, in each use, a correspondingly different connotation. But
terms used in popular discourse should, as far as possible, have their
connotations determined by classical usage, i.e., by the sense in
which they are used by writers and speakers who are acknowledged masters
of the language, such as Dryden and Burke. In this case the classical
connotation determines the definition; so that to define terms thus used
is nothing else than to analyse their accepted meanings.

It must not, however, be supposed that in popular use the connotation
of any word is invariable. Logicians have attempted to classify
terms into Univocal (having only one meaning) and Æquivocal (or
ambiguous); and no doubt some words (like 'civil,' 'natural,' 'proud,'
'liberal,' 'humorous') are more manifestly liable to ambiguous use than
some others. But in truth all general terms are popularly and
classically used in somewhat different senses.

Figurative or tropical language chiefly consists in the transfer of
words to new senses, as by metaphor or metonymy. In the course of years,
too, words change their meanings; and before the time of Dryden our
whole vocabulary was much more fluid and adaptable than it has since
become. Such authors as Bacon, Milton, and Sir Thomas Browne often used
words derived from the Latin in some sense they originally had in Latin,
though in English they had acquired another meaning. Spenser and
Shakespeare, besides this practice, sometimes use words in a way that
can only be justified by their choosing to have it so; whilst their
contemporaries, Beaumont and Fletcher, write the perfect modern
language, as Dryden observed. Lapse of time, however, is not the chief
cause of variation in the sense of words. The matters which terms are
used to denote are often so complicated or so refined in the assemblage,
interfusion, or gradation of their qualities, that terms do not exist in