196 
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
imply a quantitative assertion, as when one says sixpence is 
part of a pound, or a factor indispensable, as when one says 
"A wheel is part of a motor-car," or ... 
The fact is that very few of us know what words mean; 
fewer still take the trouble to enquire. We calmly, we 
carelessly assume that our minds are identical with that of 
the writer, at least on that point; and then we wonder that 
there should be misunderstandings! 
The fact is (again!) that usually we don't really want to 
know; it is so very much easier to drift down the river of 
discourse, "lazily, lazily, drowsily, drowsily, in the noonday 
sun." 
Why is this so satisfactory? Because although we may not 
know what a word means, most words have a pleasant or 
unpleasant connotation, each for himself, either because of 
the ideas or images thus begotten, of hopes or memories 
stirred up, or merely for the sound of the word itself. (I have 
gone a month's journey out of my way to visit a town, just 
because I liked the sound of the name!) 
Then there are devices: style-rhythm, 
cadence, rime, 
ornamentation of a thousand kinds. I think one may take it 
that the good writer makes use of such artifice to make his 
meaning clear; the bad writer to obscure it, or to conceal the 
fact that he has none. 
I had a marvellous lesson myself some years earlier. I had 
cut down a certain ritual of initiation to what I thought were 
the very barest bones, chiefly to make it easy to commit to 
memory. Then came a candidate who was deaf-not merely 
"a little hard of hearing"; his tympana were ruptured-and 
the question was How? 
All right for most of it; one could show him the words 
typed on slips. But during part of the ceremony he was 
hoodwinked; one was reduced to the deaf-and-dumb alphabet 
devised for such occasions. I am as clumsy and stupid at that 
as I am at most things, and lazy, infernally lazy, on top of 
that. Well, when it came to the point, the communication of 
the words became abominably, intolerably tedious. And