Page 86 - 4805

words from which, in fact, belong to both these categories. Yet,
poetic words have a further characteristic - a lofty, high-flown,
sometimes archaic colouring:
Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues
can poison truth And constancy lives in realms above; And life is
thorny; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love, Doth
work like madness in the brain...” (Coleridge)
Yet, generally speaking, educated people in both modem
fiction and real life use learned words quite naturally and their
speech is certainly the richer for it.
On the other hand, excessive use of learned elements in
conversational speech presents grave hazards. Utterances
overloaded with such words have pretensions of refinement and
elegance but achieve the exact opposite verging on the absurd and
ridiculous. Writer use this phenomenon for stylistic purposes.
When a character in a book or in a play uses too many learned
words, the obvious inappropriatencss of his speech in an informal
situation produces a comic effect:
Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion by B. Shaw engaging in
traditional English small talk answers the question “Will it rain,
do you think?” in the following way:
“The shallow depression in the west of these islands is likely
to move slowly in an easterly direction. There are no indications of
any great change in the barometrical situation.
Archaic and obsolete words stand close to the learned
words, particularly to the modes of poetic diction. Learned words
and archaisms arc both associated with the printed pages. Yet
many learned words may also be used in conversational situations.
This cannot be happened to archaisms, which are invariably
restricted to the printed page. These words are moribund, already
partly or fully out of circulation, rejected by the living language.
Their last refuge is in historical novels (whose authors use them to
create a particular period atmosphere) and, of course, in poetry
which is rather conservative in its choice of words.

85