Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: USES AND ABUSES OF TWO ENGLISH WORDS FEMALE, WOMAN Words are winged, the old Greeks used to say. Even in our less imaginative vision we see them flying from soul to soul. And when their journeyings are protracted, when they fare through generations, how startling the changes of their meaning! How vastly their subtle shifting of color may affect human life! Take, for instance, a single noun of our English speech, and ideas grouping round its singular and plural within these last one hundred years: woman; women. Why are the two possessives— woman's and women's—current and contending? Why, instead of saying, for instance, Woman's Executive Board do many of us now choose to say Women's Executive Board? What endeavor to truth and refine some thought first led to the variation, and to its ten thousand repetitions? Bias of temperament can not explain it. Nor is one word easier to pronounce than the other. A hundred years ago, in America and in England, popular usage chose the singular, woman's. But since then has grown a differentiation. Lately, for example, "The Century Dictionary" printed woman's, "The Encyclopaedia Britannica" women's. Does the variation indicate a psychical difference between ourselves and our cousins over the sea? We think so. A history, a traceable and illuminative tale, lies behind this seemingly trivial difference of singular and plural, and helps make plain the history and characteristics of ourselves and our kin in England. Let us in broad lines sketch what happened. In early centuries in England, when the English language had become a formed and completed speech, a vernacular worth a translation of the Bible, the words women, a plural with woman for its singular, (already an amalgam of wif and man) described one-half of humanity. The English ...