THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS
Professor Barrett Wendell, in his chapter on Clearness, already referred to, gives a rather amusing example drawn from football parlance. Centre-rush and half-back, and a score of similar words, he admits, are regularly constructed compounds formed from perfectly familiar English words and yet to him devoid of any definite meaning. But, he goes on to say, he has been informed and he believes that there are students in his own lecture courses to whom these same words have a real significance. Similarly, a treatise on some special branch of physics or botany or civil engineering may be couched in the clearest possible terms and yet convey no meaning at all to the reader unversed in those sciences. For instance, I open quite at random the fourth volume of a recent Reference Handbook of the Medical Science and I learn:
Double hemiplegia is synonymous with cere-
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