Transfer from Circ. Dept AUG 20 1919 CONTENTS OF VOLUME II. 1832. CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE. A NEW SERIES. CONFUSION OF WORDS. "THERE is nothing more common," says the lively Voltaire, "than to read and to converse to no purpose. In history, in morals, in law, in physic, and in divinity, be careful of EQUIVOCAL TERMS." One of the ancients wrote a book to prove that there was no word which did not convey an ambiguous and uncertain meaning. If we possessed this lost book, our ingenious dictionaries of " synonyms" would not probably prove its uselessness. Whenever the same word is associated by the parties with different ideas, they may converse, or controverse, till "the crack of doom!" This, with a little obstinacy and some agility in shifting his ground, makes VOL. II. (New Series.) B the fortune of an opponent. While one party is worried in disentangling a meaning, and the other is winding and unwinding about him with another, a word of the kind we have mentioned, carelessly or perversely slipped into an argument, may prolong it for a century or two-as it has happened! Vaugelas, who passed his whole life in the study of words, would not allow that the sense was to determine the meaning of words; for, says he, it is the business of words to explain the sense. Kant for a long while discovered in this way a facility of arguing without end, as at this moment do our political economists. "I beseech you," exclaims a poetical critic, in the agony of a confusion of words,' "not to ask whether I mean this or that!" Our critic, convinced that he has made himself understood, grows immortal by obscurity! for he shows how a few simple words, not intelligible, may admit of volumes of vindication. Throw out a word, capable of fifty senses, and you raise fifty parties! Should some friend of peace enable the fifty to repose on one sense, that innocent word, no longer ringing the tocsin of a party, would lie in forget |