There are those still who hold that words get themselves attributed to things by a kind of mysterious natural process, in which men have no part; that there are organic forces in speech itself which- by fermentation, or digestion, or crystallization, or something of the sort- produce new material and alter old. No one, however, has ever managed, if indeed any one has ever attempted, to show these forces in actual operation, or to analyze and set forth their way of working and the results it produces in detail, exhibiting their product item by item.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.145