" Whipsnade was visited on VJ-day by a sizable crowd
of townees." I am not in fact quoting this sentence ; I have manufactured it ; not because I like the look of it—I don't—but to provide a text for a discussion of two words which have rather jarred my system lately. Words somehow get a vogue, and in the last few weeks I have seemed to come on " sizable " everywhere I looked. And what a word. How was it ever coined? The common meaning of the suffix-able—is familiar enough. " Tolerable " is something that can be tolerated ; is " sizable" something that can be sized? The dictionary helps very little. Some miscreant invented the word in the seventeenth century and there it is. But at least there is no need to drag it back into currency. " Townee" worries me much more, for it comes with the special imprimatur of Dr. G. M. Trevelyan, who uses it in a chapter in the new book on the National Trust. That, it may reasonably be said, settles the matter, and I agree unreservedly that it does. And yet, and yet—in writing about what the war will teach the townsman, would not it meet the case just to call him townsman? I suppose the Master of Trinity is a townee in term-time, for he is certainly an inhabitant of a town.
But I should hardly feel it polite to call him one.
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