t _unique_ of all
The other _alternative_
_Endorse_ on the back
_Incredible_ to believe
A _criterion_ to go by
An _appetite_ to eat
_A panacea_ for all ills
_Popular_ with the people
_Biography_ of his life
_Autobiography_ of his own life
_Vitally_ alive
A new, _novel_, and ingenious explanation
_Mutual_ dislike for each other
_Omniscient_ knowledge of all subjects
A _material_ growth in mental power
_Peculiar_ faults of his own
Fly into an _ebullient_ passion
To _saturate_ oneself with gold and silver
Elected by _acclamation on_ a secret ballot.

V.

INDIVIDUAL WORDS: AS MEMBERS OF VERBAL FAMILIES

Our investigation into the nature, qualities, and fortunes of single words
must now merge into a study of their family connections. We do not go far
into this new phase of our researches before we perceive that the career
of a word may be very complicated. Most people, if you asked them, would
tell you that an individual word is a causeless entity--a thing that was
never begotten and lacks power to propagate. They would deny the
possibility that its course through the world could be other than
colorless, humdrum. Now words thus immaculately conceived and fatefully
impotent, words that shamble thus listlessly through life, there are. But
many words are born in an entirely normal way; have a grubby boyhood, a
vigorous youth, and a sober maturity; marry, beget sons and daughters,
become old, enfeebled, even senile; and suffer neglect, if not death. In
their advanced age they are exempted by the discerning from enterprises
that call for a lusty agility, but are drafted into service by those to
whom all levies are alike. Indeed in their very prime of manhood their
vicissitudes are such as to make them seem human. Some rise in the world
some sink; some start along the road of grandeur or obliquity, and then
backslide or reform. Some are social climbers, and mingle in company where
verbal dress coats are worn; some are social degenerates, and consort with
the ragamuffins and guttersnipes of language. Some marry at their own
social level, some above them, some beneath; some go down in childless
bachelorhood or leave an unkempt and illegitimate progeny. And if you
trace their own lineage, you will find for some that it is but decent and
middle-class, for some that it is mongrelized and miscegenetic, for some
that it is proud, ancient, yea perhaps patriarchal.

It is contrary to nature for a word, as for a man,