Have you ever stopped to think how you should get along for a single day without words? It is not strange if you haven't. We all accept our most wonderful possessions in a matter-of-fact way. We use them freely but seldom think how marvelous they are. And surely language is one of the best of them all. Isn't it worth while to stop for a few moments to consider just what speech is and how much it means to us in our daily life?

Perhaps you know that the word language is formed from the Latin word lingua, which means tongue. It is easy to see why words, after they were invented, should be named for the tongue. The strange thing is that there ever came to be such things as words.

We can understand that people might have learned to make others know what they were thinking about by pointing or making gestures. We can even understand how picture writing like that of the Indians grew up. But doesn't it seem strange that men should have come to use spoken and written words? How do you suppose that people ever came to agree among themselves that definite sounds, made by the tongue and other organs, should stand for things with which these symbols seem to have no connection? How did c-a-t, for example, come to stand for a certain animal?

It would be interesting to know; but the really important thing is that we do have speech, - that words, such as d-o-g, r-e-d, r-u-n-n-i-n-g, have come to stand for the same things to all English-speaking people, and that we can therefore use these signs to call to the minds of other persons what we are thinking about. Life would be a very different thing without words.

It would help you to understand how different it would be if you could read the story of Helen Keller,1 who has been blind and deaf since she was nineteen months old. It was not until her seventh year that she became conscious of the existence of words. But then came what she calls the most important day of her life. A wise and skillful teacher came to her, and one day soon after there was revealed to her the mystery of speech. She learned that things have names; and this knowledge, she says, "awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. . . . Every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange new sight that had come to me."

But speech is more than single words or lists of words. If I wish to make you think of a bird, I probably wish to make you think of something about the bird. In order that you may share my thought I must use a group of words and must arrange them in some definite fashion. Language, then, is a combination of words, put together in such a way as to "make sense"; in other words, it is com-po-si-tion.

1 The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller; Grosset and Dunlap, Publishers.