It ought to be neither so vast that no one person can encompass it nor so narrow and trivial that no one 't be afraid to express your own opinions and feelings. You are a vital part of the subject. No matter what the topic, you are really writing about how you understand it, how you feel about it. | For more material and information please visit UNUSUAL WORDS AND COLLOCATIONS 327 Here again we see that the unusual words are exactly right. Kipling implies the callousness of the British government toward those who died in its service in India their coffins are merchandise and the charges for loading and storage are carefully calculated. Unusual Meanings Uncommonness may reside not so much in the rarity of the word itself as in the meaning it carries. A writer may evoke an older meaning closer to the etymological sense. Robert Frost writing about the United States speaks of the land realizing itself westward. We think of realize as meaning to understand clearly and we must pause a moment to grasp that Frost calls up the older sense of to make real the nation created its reality as it drove westward. And in the following sentence imagination does not have its common meaning of creative faculty but rather signifies the productions of that creativity Universities flourished scholars wrote their profundities and novelists their imaginations. Morris Bishop Everyday words may also be made striking by being shifted out of their usual grammatical roles. Here a writer describing the coming of spring employs indestructible as a noun Under the spruce boughs which overlay the borders the first shoots of snowdrops appeared the indestructible. E. B. White Neologisms Neologisms constitute a special class of rare words. Literally new words they are made up by the writer. Some are new in being original combinations of phonemes that is sounds . James Thurber invents several such neologisms to describe the family car being hit by a trolley For more material and information please visit 328 DICTION Tires booped and whoosed the fenders queeled and graked the steering wheel rose up like a spectre and disappeared in the direction of Franklin Avenue with a melancholy whistling sound bolts and gadgets flew like sparks from a Catherine wheel. .
