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Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been
out and about on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, and the fields for
so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today.
They are stored with other meanings, with other memories. You cannot use a brand new
word in an old language because of the very obvious, yet always mysterious fact, that
a word is not a single and separate entity; it is part of other words. Indeed it is not
a word until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other. To combine new words
with old words is fateful to the constitution of the sentence. Our business is to see what
we can do with the old English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in
new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth?
That is the question.