A Tramp Abroad — Volume 05
"That is Chinese for 'hill.'"  

"'KAHKAHPONEEKA'?"  

"'Ascent.' Choctaw."  

"'But we were again overtaken by bad HOGGLEBUMGULLUP.' What does 'HOGGLEBUMGULLUP' mean?"  

"That is Chinese for 'weather.'"  

"Is 'HOGGLEBUMGULLUP' better than the English word? Is it any more descriptive?"  

"No, it means just the same."  

"And 'DINGBLATTER' and 'GNILLIC,' and 'BOPPLE,' and 'SCHNAWP'—are they better than the English words?"  

"No, they mean just what the English ones do."  

"Then why do you use them? Why have you used all this Chinese and Choctaw and Zulu rubbish?"  

"Because I didn't know any French but two or three words, and I didn't know any Latin or Greek at all."  

"That is nothing. Why should you want to use foreign words, anyhow?"  

"They adorn my page. They all do it."  

"Who is 'all'?"  

"Everybody. Everybody that writes elegantly. Anybody has a right to that wants to."  

"I think you are mistaken." I then proceeded in the following scathing manner.  "When really learned men write books for other learned men to read, they are justified in using as many learned words as they please—their audience will understand them; but a man who writes a book for the general public to read is not justified in disfiguring his pages with untranslated foreign expressions. It is an insolence toward the majority of the purchasers, for it is a very frank and impudent way of saying, 'Get the translations made yourself if you want them, this book is not written for the ignorant classes.' There are men who know a foreign language so well and have used it so long in their daily life 
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