SHORT WORDS | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 22, 1881

SHORT WORDS.

THESE remarks of Horatio Seymour are full of wisdom: "We must not only think in words, but we must all try to use the best words, and those which in speech so will put what is in our minds into the minds of others. This is the great art which those must gain who wish to teach in the school, the church, at the bar, or through the press. To do this in the right way they should use the short words which we learn in early life, and which have the same sense to all classes of men. The English of our Bible is good. Now and then some long words are found, and they always hurt the verses in which they are found. Take that which says: "O ye generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" There is one long word which ought not to be in it—namely 'generation.' In the old version the old word 'brood' is used. Read the verse again with this term, and you will feel its full force: "O ye viper's brood, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" Crime sometimes does not look like crime when it is set before us in the many folds of a long word. When a man steals and we call it a "defalcation," we are at loss to know if it is a blunder or a crime. If he does not tell the truth, and we are told that it is a case of "prevarication," it takes us some time to know just what we should think of it. No man will ever cheat himself into wrong-doing, nor will he be at a loss to judge of others, if he thinks and speaks of acts in clear, crisp terms. It is a good rule, if one is at a loss to know if an act is right or wrong, to write it down in short, straight-out English."