There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people
were simply walking about. Our world would be more silent if it
were more strenuous. And this which is true of the apparent physical
bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect.
Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery;
and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought.
Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods
to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable.
Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they
are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk
and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once
in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable.
If you say "The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is
recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological
evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,"
you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement
of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin "I wish
Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,"
you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged
to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short
words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the
word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."

But these long comfortable words that save modern people the toil
of reasoning have one particular aspect in which they are especially
ruinous and confusing. This difficulty occurs when the same long word
is used in different connections to mean quite different things.
Thus, to take a well-known instance, the word "idealist" has
one meaning as a piece of philosophy and quite another as a piece
of moral rhetoric. In the same way the scientific materialists
have had just reason to complain of people mixing up "materialist"
as a term of cosmology with "materialist" as a moral taunt.
So, to take a cheaper instance, the man who hates "progressives"
in London always calls himself a "progressive" in South Africa.

A confusion quite as unmeaning as this has arisen in connection
with the word "liberal" as applied to religion and as applied
to politics and society. It is often suggested that all Liberals
ought to be freethinkers, because they ought to love everything that
is free. You might just as well say that all idea