【正文】 s work is a constant struggle to get the right word in the right place, to find that particular word that will convey his meaning exactly, that will persuade the reader or soothe him or startle or amuse him. He never succeeds altogether sometimes he feels that he scarcely succeeds at all but such successes as he has are what make the thing worth doing. There is no book of rules for this game. One progresses through everlasting experiment on the basis of everwidening experience. There are few useful generalizations that one can make about words as words, but there are perhaps a few. Some words are what we call “colorful”. By this we mean that they are calculated to produce a picture or induce an emotion. They are dressy instead of plain, specific instead of general, loud instead of soft. Thus, in place of “Her heart beat,” we may write “Her heart pounded throbbed, fluttered, danced.” Instead of “He sat in his chair,” we may say, “He lounged, sprawled, coiled.” Instead of “It was hot,” we may say, “It was blistering, sultry, muggy, suffocating, steamy, wilting.” However, it should not be supposed that the fancy word is always better. Often it is as well to write “Her heart beat” or “It was hot” if that is all it did or all it was. Ages differ in how they like their prose. The nineteenth century liked it rich and smoky. The twentieth has usually preferred it lean and cool. The twentieth century writer, like all writers, is forever seeking the exact word, but he is wary of sounding feverish. He tends to pitch it low, to understate it, to throw it away. He knows that if he gets too colorful, the audience is likely to giggle. See how this strikes you: “As the rich, golden glow of the sunset died away along the eternal western hills, Angela’s limpid blue eyes looked softly and trustingly into Montague’s flashing brown ones and her heart pounded like a drum in time with the joyous song surging in her soul”. Some people like that sort of thing, but most modern readers would say, “Good grief,” and turn on the television. Some words we would call not so much colorful as colored that is, loaded with associations, good or bad. All words except perhaps structure words – have associations of some sort. We have said that the meaning of a word is the sum of the contexts in which it occurs. When we hear a word, we hear with it an echo of all the situations in which we have heard it before. In some words, these echoes are obvious and discussable. The word mother, for example, has, for most people, agreeable associations. When you hear mother you probably think of home, safety, love, food, and various other pleasant things. If one writes, “She was like a mother to me,” he gets an effect, which he would not get in “She was like an aunt to me”. The advertiser makes use of the associations of mother by working it in when he talks about his product. The politician works it in when he talks about himself. So also with such words as home, liberty, fireside, contentment, patriot, tenderness, sacrifice, childlike, manly, bluff, limpid. All of these words are loaded with favorable associations that would be rather hard to indicate in a straightforward definition. There is more than a literal difference between “They sat around the fireside” and “They sat around the stove” They might have been equally warm and happy around the stove, but fireside suggests leisure, grace, quiet tradition, congenial pany, and stove does not. Conversely, some words have bad associations. Mother suggests pleasant things, but motherinlaw does not. Many mothersinlaw are heroically lovable and some mothers drink gin all day and beat their children insensible, but these facts of life are beside the point. The thing is that mother sounds good and mother in law does not. Or consider the word intellectual. This would seem to be a plimentary term, but in point of fact it is not, for it has picked up associations of impracticality and ineffectuality and general dopiness. The question of whether to use loaded words or not depends on what is being written. The scientist, the scholar。t know the pleasure of being hungry any more. Too much of anythingtoo much music, entertainment, happy snacks, or time spent with one39。 the longawaited meal became a feast to remember and an almost sacred celebration of life. Now we go off to the office and e home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen peas. Very nice, but too much of it, too easy and regular, served up without effort or wanting. We eat, we are lucky。 the children wailed。 the women and children waved goodbye. The cave was empty of men for days on end。s expectations alive. I remember learning this lesson long ago as a child, when treats and orgies were few, and when I discovered that the greatest pitch of happiness was not in actually eating a toffee but in gazing at it beforehand. True, the first bite was delicious, but once the toffee was gone one was left with nothing, neither toffee nor lust. Besides, the whole toffeeness of toffees was imperceptibly diminished by the gross act of having eaten it. No, the best was in waning it, in sitting and looking at it, when one tasted an inexhaustible treasure house of flavours. So, for me, one of the keenest pleasures of appetite remains in the wanting, not the satisfaction. In wanting a peach, or a whisky, or a particular texture or sound, or to be with a particular friend. For in this condition, of course, I know that the object of desire is always at its most flawlessly perfect. Which is why I would carry the preservation of appetite to the extent of deliberate fasting, simply because I think that appetite is too good to lose, too precious to be bludgeoned into insensibility by satiation and overdoing it. For that matter, I don39。s desire, but sorrier still for those who did. I got mine once only, and it nearly killed me, and I39。ve g