y what can be
expressed only doubtfully by other words.

Words must be national. Provincialisms.

Second, words must be of national use. They cannot be words confined
to a locality. When Morris talks of a house that has been "gammoned,"
he deprives a large number of readers of his meaning. "Gums" and
"brasses" may be good in certain districts of England, but in
literature they should not be used, for they would not generally be
understood. For the same reason much of the common conversation of the
South is foreign to a native of New York. Whoever employs the language
of a locality limits his circle of readers to that locality. To write
for all he must use the language of all; he must avoid provincialisms.

Technical and Bookish Words.

Like words that are used by a small region are words which are
understood by a clique of persons. Scholars are inclined to use a
scholarly vocabulary. The biologist has one; the chemist another; the
philosopher a third. This technical vocabulary may be a necessity at
times; but when a specialist addresses the public, his words must be
the words which an average cultured man can understand. Such words can
be found if the writer will look for them; if he does not, his work
can scarcely be called literature. Technical words and bookish terms
are not words of national use.

The following by Josiah Royce illustrates how clearly a most abstruse
topic can be handled by a man willing to take the trouble:[50]--

"If you ask what sort of thing this substance is, the first
answer is, that it is something eternal; and that means, not
that it lasts a good while, but that no possible temporal
view of it could exhaust its nature. All things that happen
result from the one substance. This surely means that what
happens now and what happened millions of years ago are, for
the substance, equally present and necessary results. To
illustrate once more in my own way: A spider creeping back
and forth across a circle could, if she were geometrically
disposed, measure out in temporal succession first this
diameter, and then that. Crawling first over one diameter,
she would say, 'I now find this so long.' Afterwards
examining another diameter, she would say, 'It has now
happened that what I have just measured proves to be
precisely as long as what I measured some time since, and no
longer.' The toil of such a spider might