5. Each of the subjoined phrases contradicts itself or repeats its idea clumsily. The key to the difficulty lies in the italicized words. What is their true meaning?
A weekly _journal_ _Ultimate_ end Final _ultimatum_ _Final_ completion Previous _preconceptions_ _Nauseating_ seasickness _Join_ together _Descend_ down _Prefer_ better _Argent_ silver Completely _annihilate_ _Unanimously_ by all Most _unique_ of all The other _alternative_ _Endorse_ on the back _Incredible_ to believe A _criterion_ to go by An _appetite_ to eat _A panacea_ for all ills _Popular_ with the people _Biography_ of his life _Autobiography_ of his own life _Vitally_ alive A new, _novel_, and ingenious explanation _Mutual_ dislike for each other _Omniscient_ knowledge of all subjects A _material_ growth in mental power _Peculiar_ faults of his own Fly into an _ebullient_ passion To _saturate_ oneself with gold and silver Elected by _acclamation on_ a secret ballot.
INDIVIDUAL WORDS: AS MEMBERS OF VERBAL FAMILIES
Our investigation into the nature, qualities, and fortunes of single words must now merge into a study of their family connections. We do not go far into this new phase of our researches before we perceive that the career of a word may be very complicated. Most people, if you asked them, would tell you that an individual word is a causeless entity--a thing that was never begotten and lacks power to propagate. They would deny the possibility that its course through the world could be other than colorless, humdrum. Now words thus immaculately conceived and fatefully impotent, words that shamble thus listlessly through life, there are. But many words are born in an entirely normal way; have a grubby boyhood, a vigorous youth, and a sober maturity; marry, beget sons and daughters, become old, enfeebled, even senile; and suffer neglect, if not death. In their advanced age they are exempted by the discerning from enterprises that call for a lusty agility, but are drafted into service by those to whom all levies are alike. Indeed in their very prime of manhood their vicissitudes are such as to make them seem human. Some rise in the world some sink; some start along the road of grandeur or obliquity, and then backslide or reform. Some are social climbers, and mingle in company where verbal dress coats are worn; some are social degenerates, and consort with the ragamuffins and guttersnipes of language. Some marry at their own social level, some above them, some beneath; some go down in childless bachelorhood or leave an unkempt and illegitimate progeny. And if you trace their own lineage, you will find for some that it is but decent and middle-class, for some that it is mongrelized and miscegenetic, for some that it is proud, ancient, yea perhaps patriarchal.