A. D. SHEFFIELD, 1938

1. Meaningfulness

The value of a word for use in a given connection is not a matter merely of its precise reference to some object of thought which we may call THE meaning of that word. It has a "meaningfulness" which takes in several kinds of significance. Let us first recognize and then examine these. A word shows its expressive value -

a. In what it refers to:  in what we call its "sense." Thus the word chuckle refers to a particular sort of laugh.

b. In our emotional response  to that which it names. Thus the word giggle not only refers to a particular sort of laugh but stirs a feeling about  that way of laughing - as a way of silly young things we do not wish to be like.

c. In the plane of discourse  upon which the speaker or writer is using his words: in what I. A. Richards calls the "tone" of an utterance -- solemn, bookish, chatty, and so on. Thus the word chortle is definitely colloquial in tone, suggesting a jocose attitude of its user towards the speech-occasion. In contrast, the word cachinnation is consciously bookish.

d. In the word's sensuous qualities as a sound entering into a desired phrase-pattern. Thus in "a ghastly, mirthless grin" the last word rounds out a rhythm-pattern ->

with a needed stressed syllable; it completes a suggestive progression of vowel-sounds (ah - erh - i); and it helps to unify the phrase by alliterating its start and close.

The two last-mentioned elements in expressive speech should remind us that not words but utterances  are the real units of choice in diction, and that a word's value is always conditioned by its context  - by what is being said in its whole immediate connection. This latter is what carries the "sayer's" controlling intention , and the rightness of any one word will appear in the response which the whole utterance is meaning to make happen. Thus, taken by itself, the verb thrid (an old variant of thread) seems merely odd, and so does boskage, improvised from bosk, a thicket; but in Tennyson's Dream of Fair Women  these words interplay with others to stir certain desired feelings for the daughter of Jephthah:-

"Glory to God," she sang, and past afar,
Thridding the sombre boskage of the wood
          Toward the morning star.