d commonplace. Speech that is merely easy and natural
is adequate. If the incident is not particularly significant in a
dramatic or emotional sense, the way that the character would talk in
such circumstances is not hard to find. The story requires that a
Southern gentleman of the old school welcome a stranger to his house,
let us say; it will not be hard to find the host's words on that
occasion. But suppose he must discover a few pages farther on that the
stranger is his daughter's seducer. What will he say? The writer must
find for him words that will chime with the tensity and dramatic value
of the situation. To meet the necessity the writer has three resources.

The first lies apart from the matter of speech. By just portrayal of the
physical effect of such a discovery upon a character the writer will
accomplish much. To put it flippantly, the character will be made to
talk naturally by making him speechless. To put it justly, in such a
heightened moment in a story narration should be very detailed, and the
writer should show the physical effect of any discovery upon a character
before transcribing the words born of the moment.

The second resource of the writer to meet the necessity that a
character's words fit the emotional and dramatic qualities of a
situation is largely mechanical. Even casual speech is elliptical and
exclamatory; speech born of excitement or agony of soul is strongly so.
The more broken and fragmentary the character's speech, the greater the
suggestion of emotional stress and upheaval.

The third resource of the writer is a matter of diction. English is a
language compounded of Anglo-Saxon and Latin and Greek elements. The
primary basis of the tongue is Anglo-Saxon; that is why it is English,
and not a Romance language. We learn the simpler, less abstract part of
our vocabulary, the part that stands for fundamentals, in childhood; the
rest is acquired later. Not only is the Anglo-Saxon word the word we
know best; it is also the word which will express our deepest loves and
dreads and hates. The Latin element of the language gives it its
flexibility and its capacity to express ideas, but its capacity to
express emotion resides in its Anglo-Saxon element. Love, hate, birth,
death, God, devil, father, mother, sister, brother, sin, lust, greed,
filth, hope, care, weep, laugh, smile--all are strictly English words of
Teutonic origin, and all are much more forceful and suggestive or
connotative th