| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: reasons why a man should prefer his own way of speaking to that of others,
unless by so doing he becomes unintelligible. The struggle for existence
among words is not of that fierce and irresistible kind in which birds,
beasts and fishes devour one another, but of a milder sort, allowing one
usage to be substituted for another, not by force, but by the persuasion,
or rather by the prevailing habit, of a majority. The favourite figure, in
this, as in some other uses of it, has tended rather to obscure than
explain the subject to which it has been applied. Nor in any case can the
struggle for existence be deemed to be the sole or principal cause of
changes in language, but only one among many, and one of which we cannot
easily measure the importance. There is a further objection which may be
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: the puddler go, crept after him. The three men waited outside.
Doctor May walked up and down, chafed. Suddenly he stopped.
"Go back, Mitchell! You say the pocket and the heart of the
world speak without meaning to these people. What has its head
to say? Taste, culture, refinement? Go!"
Mitchell was leaning against a brick wall. He turned his head
indolently, and looked into the mills. There hung about the
place a thick, unclean odor. The slightest motion of his hand
marked that he perceived it, and his insufferable disgust. That
was all. May said nothing, only quickened his angry tramp.
"Besides," added Mitchell, giving a corollary to his answer, "it
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Flower Fables by Louisa May Alcott: and love nestled in her heart, and all was bright again.
So better and happier grew the child, fairer and sweeter grew the
flower, till Spring came smiling over the earth, and woke the flowers,
set free the streams, and welcomed back the birds; then daily did
the happy child sit among her flowers, longing for the gentle Elf
to come again, that she might tell her gratitude for all the magic
gift had done.
At length, one day, as she sat singing in the sunny nook where
all her fairest flowers bloomed, weary with gazing at the far-off sky
for the little form she hoped would come, she bent to look with joyful
love upon her bosom flower; and as she looked, its folded leaves
Flower Fables |
