The most important stabilizing influence of print, however, is its fixation of meanings. It makes possible their maintenance uncorrupted and unmodified over wide stretches in which there are phonetic variations. These variant articulations in different parts of a large country where the same language is spoken, would, if unchecked, eventually modify the sense of words. Print largely prevents this from happening. One can read newspapers published in Maine, California, Virginia, and Iowa, without noticing any significant, or, in many cases, even slight differences in vocabulary or construction. There are, of course, local idioms, but these persist in conversation, rather than in print, save where they are caught up and exploited for literary purposes by a Bret Harte, a Mark Twain, or an O. Henry. COUNTER-TENDENCIES TOWARD DIFFERENTIATION. While the _standard_ language does become fixed and stable, there are, in the daily life of different social groups, varying actual languages. Every class, or profession, every social group, whether of interest, or occupation, has its slight individuality in articulation or vocabulary. We still observe that members of a family talk alike; sometimes households have literally their own household words. And on different economic and social levels, in different sports, intellectual, professional, and business pursuits, we notice slightly different "actual" languages. These partly overlap. The society lady, the business man, the musician, the professor of literature, the mechanic, have specializations of vocabulary and construction, but there is, for each of them, a great common linguistic area. Every individual's speech is a resultant of the various groups with whom he associates. He is affected in his speech habits most predominantly, of course, by his most regular associates, professional and social. In consequence we still mark out a man, as much as anything, by the kind of language he speaks. The mechanic and the man of letters are not likely to be mistaken for each other, if overheard in a street car. Many literary and dramatic characters are memorable for their speech habits. Such types are successful when they do hit upon really significant linguistic peculiarities. Their frequent failures lie in making the language of a particular social type artificially stable. No one ever talks quite as the conventional stage policeman, stage professor, and stage Englishman talk.