Open Bright Stiff Hard
Low Cool Sharp Flat
Keen Strong Dull Raw
Small Odd Warm Deep
Eccentric

Imperfectly Understood Facts and Ideas

Thus far in this chapter we have been considering many-sided words.  We must now turn to a certain class of facts and ideas that deserve better understanding and closer analysis than we usually accord them.

These facts and ideas are supposed to be matters of common knowledge.  And in their broad scope and purport they are.  Because acquaintance with them is taken for granted it behooves us to know them.  Yet they are in reality complicated, and when we attempt to deal with them in detail, our assurance forsakes us.  All of us have our “blind sides” intellectually—­ quake to have certain areas of discussion entered, because we foresee that we must sit idly by without power to make sensible comment.  Unto as many as possible of these blind sides of ourselves we should pronounce the blessed words, “Let there be light.”  We have therefore to consider certain matters and topics which are supposed to belong to the common currency of social information, but with which our familiarity is less thoroughgoing than it should be.

What are these facts and topics?  Take for illustration the subject of aeronautics.  Suppose we have but the vaguest conception of the part played or likely to be played by aircraft in war, commerce, and pleasure.  Suppose we are not aware that some craft are made to float and others to be driven by propellers.  Suppose such terms as Zeppelin, blimp, monoplane, biplane, hydroplane, dirigible have no definite import for us.  Does not our knowledge fall short of that expected of well-informed men in this present age?

Or take military terms.  Everybody uses them—­clergymen, pacifists, clubmen, social reformers, novelists, tramps, brick-layers, Big-Stickers.  We cannot escape them if we would.  We ourselves use them.  But do we use them with precise and masterly understanding?  You call one civilian colonel and another major; which have you paid the higher compliment?  You are uncertain whether a given officer is a colonel or a major, and you wish to address him in such fashion as will least offend his sensitiveness as to rank and nomenclature; which title—­colonel or major—­is the less perilous?  You are told that a major has command of a battalion; does that tell you anything about him?  You are told that he has command of a squadron, of a brigade, of a platoon; do these changes in circumstances have any import for you?  If not, you have too faltering a grasp upon military facts and terminology.

The best remedy for such shortcomings is to be insatiably curious on all subjects.  This of course is the ideal; nobody ever fully attains it.  Nevertheless Exercise M will set you to groping into certain broad matters relevant to ordinary needs.  Thereafter, if your purpose be strong enough, you will carry the same methods there acquired into other fields of knowledge.