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This falseness of thought and feeling is but too apt to characterize the
writing of the student, after he has passed from the common school to
the academy or the college. The term "Sophomorical" is used to describe
speeches which are full of emotion which the speaker does not feel, full
of words in four or five syllables that mean nothing, and, in respect to
imagery and illustrations, blazing with the cheap jewelry of
rhetoric,--with those rubies and diamonds that can be purchased for a
few pennies an ounce. The danger is that this "Sophomorical" style may
continue to afflict the student after he has become a clergyman, a
lawyer, or a legislator.
Practical men who may not be "college educated" still have the great
virtue of using the few words they employ as identical with facts. When
they meet a man who has half the dictionary at his disposal, and yet
gives no evidence of apprehending the real import and meaning of one
word among the many thousands he glibly pours forth, they naturally
distrust him, as a person who does not know the vital connection of all
good words with the real things they represent. Indeed, the best rule
that a Professor of Rhetoric could adopt would be to insist that no
student under his care should use an unusual word until he had _earned
the right to use it_ by making it the verbal sign of some new advance in
his thinking, in his acquirements, or in his feelings. Shakspeare, the
greatest of English writers, and perhaps the greatest of all writers,
required fifteen thousand words to embody all that his vast exceptional
intelligence acquired, thought, imagined, and discovered; and he had
earned the right to use every one of them.
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