We must study words as
individual entities.
You may think the order of our study should be reversed. No great harm
would result if it were. The learning of individual words and the
combining of them into sentences are parallel rather than successive
processes. In our babyhood we do not accumulate a large stock of terms
before we frame phrases and clauses. And our attainment of the power of
continuous iteration does not check our inroads among individual words. We
do the two things simultaneously, each contributing to our success with
the other. There are plenty of analogies for this procedure. A good
baseball player, for instance, tirelessly studies both the minutiae of his
technique (as how to hold a bat, how to stand at the plate) and the big
combinations and possibilities of the game. A good musician keeps
unremitting command over every possible touch of each key and at the same
time seeks sweeping mastery over vast and complex harmonies. So we, if we
would have the obedience of our vocabularies, dare not lag into desultory
attention to either words when disjoined or words as potentially combined
into the larger units of thought and feeling.
We might therefore consider either the individuals first or the groups
first.
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