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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III WORDS AND SENTENCES Vocabularies. The collection of words a person can command either in use or understanding is a vocabulary. Every person has three distinct ones: his reading vocabulary, his writing vocabulary, his speaking vocabulary. Of these, the reading vocabulary is the largest. There are thousands of words he recognizes in reading and although he might not be able to construct a dictionary definition for every one, he has a sufficiently clear idea to grasp the meaning. In this rude approximation to sense he is aided by the context, but for all practical purposes he understands the word. If he were writing, carefully taking time to note exactly what he was expressing, he might recall that word and so consciously put it into a sentence. He might use it in exactly the same sense in which he had seen it in print. But never in the rush of ideas and words in spoken discourse would he risk using a word he knew so slightly. If nothing more, he would beware of mispronunciation. Thus a person could easily deduce from his reading that a hangar is a building to house airplanes. He might ? to avoid repeating the word shed too frequently ? use it in writing. But until he was absolutely certain of its significance and its sound he would hardly venture to say it to other men. Spoken discourse is so alive, it moves so rapidly, that it is never so precise, so varied in its choice of words, as written material. The phraseology of written discourse sounds slightly or markedly stilted, bookish, if repeated by the tongue. This difference ? though it may appear almost trifling ? is apparent to every one. Its recognition can be partly illustrated by the fact that after President Lowell and Senator Lodge had debated on the topic, the League of Nations, in Boston and were show...

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