FEBRUARY 1, 1919. "What's in a word?" asks Admiral W. H. Smyth, with ironic intent, in his _Sailors' Word Book_. There are people who are derided because they are inclined to hesitate over that unimportant doubt, selecting their words with a waste of time which is grievous, when the real value of the sovereign is but nine and ninepence, in an uneconomic desire to be as right as their knowledge will allow. There is something to be said for them. There is a case to be made for getting a task finished as well as one knows how, if interest in it was sufficient to prompt a beginning. A friend of mine, who could write a thousand interesting and popular words about an event, or even about nothing in particular, while I was still wondering what I ought to do with it, once exclaimed in indignation and contempt when I put in a plea for Roget and his _Thesaurus_. He declared that a writer who used such a reference-book ought to be deprived of his paper and ink. _He_ never used even a dictionary. His argument and the force of it humbled me, for I gathered that when he wrote he had but to put his hand in his pocket and pull out all the words he wanted by the fistful. I envy him. I wish I could do it, but there are times when every word I try seems opaque. It is useless to pretend that Roget is of material assistance then; for what remedy is there under heaven for the slow and heavy mind? But to me Roget is full of amusing suggestions, which would really have been very helpful to me had I wanted to use his words for any other purpose than the one in hand. It is true he rarely gives you the word you think you want, but not seldom in his assorted heaps of unused ornaments you are surprised by a glance of colour from an unsuspected facet of a common word.