As one rather more interested in the choice, use, and blending of words than in the niceties of historical grammar, and having no greater knowledge of etymology than will occasionally allow me to question vulgar derivations of place-names, I would like to sound a warning against the attempt to purify the language too much--“one word, one meaning” is as impossible to impose on English as “one letter, one sound.” By all means weed out homophones, and wherever a word is overloaded and driven to death let another bear part of the burden; suppress the bastard and ugly words of journalese or commerce; keep a watchful eye on the scientists; take necessary French and Italian words out of their italics to give them an English spelling and accentuation; call a bird or a flower by its proper name, revive useful dialect or obsolescent words, and so on; that is the right sort of purification, but let it be tactfully done, let the Dictionary be a hive of living things and not a museum of minutely ticketed fossils. A common-sense precision in writing is clearly necessary; one has only to read a page or two of Nashe, Lyly, or (especially) the lesser Euphuists to come to this conclusion; their sentences often can have meant no more to themselves than a mere grimace or the latest sweep of the hat learned in Italy. A common-sense precision, yes, but when the pedantic scientist accuses the man in the street of verbal inexactitude the latter will do well to point out to the scientist that of all classes of writers, his is the least accurate of any in the use of ordinary words. Witness a typical sentence, none the better for being taken from a book which has made an extremely important contribution to modern psychological research, and is written by a scientist so enlightened that, dispensing almost entirely with the usual scientific jargon, he has improvised his own technical terms as they are needed for the argument. Very good words they are, such as would doubtless be as highly approved by the Society for Pure English, in session, as they have been by the British Association. This Doctor X is explaining the unaccountable foreknowledge in certain insects of the needs they will meet after their metamorphosis from grub to moth. He writes: ... This grub, after a life completely spent within the channels in a tree-trunk which it itself manufactures....