Of late I have begun to have an ineradical conviction that I am not--and this, not because I have a perverse fondness for the “languid” vocabulary of Silius Italicus (of whom, of course, I never had heard) but because I apparently know so little about the idiom that, by inheritance and environment, I am privileged to call my own. Not long ago, in reading a passage of excellent English prose, I came across a word that suddenly, as words have a devilish way of doing, stood out from the page and challenged me. The word was “nadir.” “At this period he was at the nadir of his fortunes,” was, I think, the sentence in which it occurred, and from the context I was able to divine not the exact meaning of the term, but the general idea it expressed. It meant, I could see, that the person in question had experienced a run of bad luck, that his affairs, for the time being, were in anything but a prosperous condition. But this was very far from knowing the specific meaning of the word “nadir.” It was obviously a noun, and a simple-looking little creature at that, yet I neither knew how to pronounce it nor what it meant. So I made a note of it, intending, later, to inform myself. Further on, I came to the word “apogee,” a familiar combination of letters that suddenly appeared to be perfectly absurd. The gentleman referred to was now no longer at the nadir of his fortunes--he was at the “apogee” of them, and, of course, I was able to guess that something agreeable had happened to him of late. But what, after all, was an apogee? I had often read the word before, and I feel sure that it may be found here and there among my “complete works,” employed with an air of authority. But, upon my soul, I didn’t know what it meant, and, therefore, virtuously made another little note. Once started upon this mad career of disillusionment, there seemed to be absolutely no end to it, and I read on and on, no longer for the pleasure of reading, but more because the book had become like one of those electric machines with metal handles, where, after turning on the current with a cent, you hang on in interesting agony because you can’t let go. “Not one jot nor tittle!” I groaned as I wrote it down. “Jot,” as a verb, conveyed something to me, but what was it when it became a noun? And what sort of a thing, for heaven’s sake, was a “tittle”? It sounded more like a kitchen utensil than anything else. (Polly, put the tittle on--No, that wouldn’t do.) And why, also, were jots and tittles such inseparable companions? In all my life I had never met a solitary tittle--a tittle walking about alone, so to speak, unaccompanied by a devoted jot. Why was it that when I did meet them, hand in hand, as usual, I didn’t know what they were?