other, frankly and promptly, "I've been hill, as they say in yours." John Bull, although he blushed to the forehead, had the good sense, if not the good nature, to join in the laugh that followed; but I am inclined to think that he never ran another tilt in that quarter. As to the sense in which sick is used by the best English writers, there can be, of course, no dispute; but I have seen this set down in a British critical journal of high class as an "obsolete sense." It is not obsolete even in modern British usage. The Birmingham "Journal" of August 29, 1869, informs its readers that, "The Sick Club question. has given rise to another batch of letters from local practitioners of medicine;" Mrs. Massingberd publishes "Sickness, its Trials and Blessings" (London, 1868); and a letter before me, from a London woman to a friend, says, "I am truly sorry to hear you are so very sick. Do make haste and get well." One of Matthew Arnold's poems is "The Sick King in Bokara," in which are these lines:

"O, King thou know'st I have been sick

These many days, and heard no thing.”

British officers have sick leave; British invalids keep a sick bed, or a sick room, and so forth, no matter what their ailment. No one of them ever speaks of ill leave, an ill room, or an ill bed. Was an Ill Club ever heard of in England? The incongruity is apparent, and it is new-born and needless. For the use of ill-an adverb- as an adjective, thus, an ill man, there is no defence and no excuse, except the contamination of bad example.

STOP for stay is a Briticism; e. g., "stop at 'ome." To stop is to arrest motion; to stay is to

remain where motion is arrested. "I shall stop at the Clarendon," says our British friend — one of the sort that does not "stop at 'ome." And he will quite surely stop there; but after he has stopped, whether he stays there, and how long, depend upon circumstances. A railway train stops at many stations, but it stays only at one.

CHAPTER VII.

WORDS THAT ARE NOT WORDS.

WHAT

THAT is a word? Every one knows. The most ignorant child, if it can speak, needs no definition of word. Probably no other word in the language is so rarely referred to in dictionaries. Until I began to write this chapter, and had framed a definition of word for myself, I had never seen or heard one, that I remember. Yet, if any reader will shut this book here, and try to tell exactly what a word is, and write down his definition before he opens the book again, he may find that the task is not so easy as he may have supposed it to be. Dr. Johnson's definition is, "a single part of speech," at the limited view and schoolmasterish style of which we may be inclined at first to smile. Richardson's first definition is, "anything spoken or told." But this applies equally to a speech or a story. His second is, "an articulate utterance of the voice," which is really the same as Worcester's, "an articulate sound." But this will not do; for baclomipivit is an articulate sound, but it is not a word, and I hope never will be one in my language; and I and you are not articulate sounds, and yet they are words. Webster's definition is,

"An articulate or vocal sound, or a combination

of articulate and vocal sounds, uttered by the human voice, and by custom expressing an idea or ideas.”

Here plainly, fulness and accuracy of definition have been sought, but they have not been attained. The definition, considering its design, is superfluous, inexact, and incomplete. The whole of the first part of it, making a distinction between articulate and vocal sounds, and between such sounds and a combination of them, is needless and from the purpose. The latter part of the definition uses. custom vaguely, and in the word idea fails to include all that is required.

A word is, an utterance of the human voice which in any community expresses a thought or a thing. If there is a village or a hamlet where ao expresses I love, or any other thought, and babo means bread, or anything else, then for that community ao and babo are words. But words, generally, are utterances which express thoughts or things to a race, a people. Custom is not an essential condition of wordship. Howells, in one of his letters (Book I. Letter 12), says of an Italian town, "There are few places this side the Alps better built and so well streeted as this." Streeted, was probably never used before, and has probably never been used since Howells used it, two hundred and forty years ago. But it expressed his thought perfectly then to all English-speaking people, and does so now, and is a participial adjective correctly formed. It is unknown to custom, but it has all the conditions of wordship, and is a much better English word than very many in "Webster's Dictionary." And, after all, Johnson's definition cov

ers the ground. We must dismiss from our minds our grammar-class notion of a sort of things, prepositions, nouns, adverbs, and articles, the name of which is part-of-speech, and think of a single part of speech. Whatever is a single part of any speech is a word.

But as there are books that are not books, so there are words that are not words. Most of them are usurpers, interlopers, or vulgar pretenders; some are deformed creatures, with only half a life in them; but some of them are legitimate enough in their pretensions, although oppressive, intolerable, useless. Words that are not words sometimes die spontaneously; but many linger, living a precarious life on the outskirts of society, uncertain of their position, and a cause of great discomfort to all right thinking, straightforward people.

These words-no-words are in many cases the consequence of a misapprehension or whimsical perversion of some real word. Sitting at dinner beside a lady whom it was always a pleasure to look upon, I offered her a croquet, which she declined, adding, in a confidential whisper, "I am Banting." I turned with surprise in my face; for she had no likeness to the obese London upholsterer, and heard the naif confession that she lived in daily fear lest the polished plumpness which so delighted my eye should develop into corpulence, and that therefore she had adopted Banting's system of diet, the doing of which she expressed by the grotesque participle banting. She was not alone in its use, I soon learned. And thus, because a proper name happened to end in ing, it was used as a participle