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7
2. Compare Holmes' position on this issue with that of Lewis Carroll (in text above). Which of the two
do you find more persuasive?
3. Why do you suppose Lewis Carroll qualified what he said by adding at the end of his declaration,
«however injudicious I may think it»? (What did he realize might turn out to be «injudicious»?)
4. How do you imagine Vaclav Havel (in text D) might answer the same question?
5. How does the girl in the peanuts cartoon answer it?
6. What words that have «histories» (see the first sentence of Havel's speech) can you think of?
II. A. Carroll tells us (in text above) that if a writer wants to use a word to mean something different
from what it commonly means, he need only tell us, at the beginning of his text, what special meaning he has
assigned to that word in his text. But what if a writer does not prepare his reader in this way? By what other
means can we guess what meaning he has assigned to a word that he has used in an unusual way (one that
cannot be found in any dictionary?)
1. One possibility is illustrated in the short Text (Part III) called «Filters Against Folly.» The writer speaks
of a «shortage of supply and a longage of demand» (1.4). The technical term for the rhetorical device used
here by this writer is «parallelism.» What do you think «parallelism» means? How do we know what he
means by longage, even though the word does not appear in any dictionary?
2. We can also guess something about the meaning of a word by its position in the sentence, or by its ending.
This can be helpful in understanding something about what a writer is telling us, even when we're not familiar
with many of the words he uses.
a. To understand something about the meaning of a word by its position in the sentence,
we have to know the parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.)-and how they
function in an English sentence.
For example:
— The first word in a sentence will usually never be a verb. But an unfamiliar word
that follows one of the familiar modals (can, may, must, would, etc.) probably is a verb
(e.g. , He may abscond with the money) , though the modal may be followed by an
adverb (e.g. , He may never abscond with the money). -An unfamiliar word following
any of the determiners (i.e., the articles «the», «a», «an», «some», «any»: the possessive
pronouns such as «my», «your», etc. ; the demonstratives «this», «that», «these», and
«those»; and the counters or measuring words such as «few», «many», «several», etc.)-
is probably a noun of some sort (e.g. , Behold the Aardvark ingesting termites). -A word
ending in «ly» is likely to be an adverb (e.g. , He is demonstrably idiotic), followed by
an adjective; though it could also be an adjective (e.g., He was a friendly creature) ,
followed by a noun. For the meaning of grammatically significant word endings such as
«ly», see «Suffixes Used to Form Parts of Speech» in the Appendix to Part I (WP).
II. B. Below are a set of sentences with nonsense words. In the blanks provided, replace each nonsense word
with some meaningful word, so that the resulting sentence is well-formed and meaningful. Use your knowledge
of the meaning aspects of word forms and their functions in English.
1. The clonks were wimbling pootishly.
The_______ were______ ing______ ly.
2 . Have you beller spiggled a _____?
Have you______er______ ed a _____?
3. This om the bodgiest puckle in the Hitch.
This______the ____iest ______in the ___ .
4. Greezzy fubbles should blably be shifted.
____ ______s should _____ly be _____ ed.
5. You can skritch your Cripples and plutch them into your trinks . You can____________ your_______s
and_____them into your______s .
What clues did you use to decide what parts of speech to choose to fill in the blanks?
II. C. In his novel, The Clockwise Orange, Anthony Burgess created a special lexicon (i.e., a list of words