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MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS 
even low cunning. It can be played by more than two players; 
but the more there are, the more the element of chance 
comes in; and this is hateful to really fine players and 
diminishes the excitement . The rapier-play of two experts, 
when a word changes from one line of formation to another, 
and then again, perhaps even a third time, is as exhilarating as 
a baseball-game or a bull-fight. 
And what the Tartarus-Tophet-lehanna 
has all this to do 
with Education, and the Great Work? This, child! H.G. Wells 
and others have pointed out with serene justice that a gap in 
your vocabulary implies a gap in your mind; you lack the 
corresponding idea. 
I put this in for you because an American officer, very 
dear to me, flitted from the Front for a few days to ask me a 
few questions-oh, 
"very much above your exalted grade" 
my dear-and I thought it might be useful to him to learn this 
game, needing, as it does, such very meagre apparatus, to wile 
away some of the long hours between attacks. He picked it 
up quickly enough; but, after a bit when I suggested that he 
should pass it on to his comrades-in-arms, he jeered at me 
openly! 
Their vocabulary to mine, he said, holds just about the 
same proportion 
as mine does to yours; 1 hypothesized 
modestly, "about five percent." (After all, I am forty-five 
years his senior.) He roared at me. "Not one in a hundred," 
he said, "know so much as the names of nine-tenths of the 
subjects that I discuss habitually and fluently. They gasp, 
they gape, they grunt, they gibber; it is almost always black 
bewilderment.
1 And some of them are college 
graduates-which I'm not." 
He was snatched from school, and given a commission on 
1. They attach no meaning to these words: 
Palaeon tology 
Criterion 
Vector 
Synthesis (They know "synthetic" but can't connect it with the noun) 
Epitome 
Foreign Policy (To them a mere phrase; no idea of its connotation or principles) 
Demonology