A syllable to a word is like a leg of a chair to a chair. Without the leg of a chair, the chair could not be sat on; still, the leg by itself is not the chair at all, and can’t be sat on.

In the word surmise, for example, the syllable sur is not a word. It has not the accepted or embodied logic of the whole word surmise. It is like the sound wol, or ock, or baka, or wonawo; sounds looking like words, but as different from words as a glass figure of a dog from a dog that runs to somebody. A syllable, then, is not meaning with form and body as a word is. This, of course, holds for the other syllable of the word, mise; which, too, is a fortuitous collection of letters, as such.

But sur and mise put together, are different from all that vast collection of sound possibility which has not yet become words; for the sound surmise by itself can do important things to a mind.

If we have surmise and sizzling brought together, along with another word (which, though a syllable in other words, just a syllable, is a word by itself) —I mean the word of: we have the phrase “surmise of sizzling.” This, I think, has humor to it, for a specific, rather mean thing, is placed with a suggestive, expansive, wondering idea-situation. Surmise, here, does a new thing to sizzling. Yet the word surmise is still made up of two syllables, no more English words as such, than the physiological oral manifestations of an infant in Polynesia or in the Bantu region of Africa.

Divided, surmise does not have logical life. It is like a chair divided, or a glass, or a table, or a house. A house, for example, divided in two, would have both parts, but it would not be a house. The division, even though what remains includes everything material the house had before, leads to a collection of brick, wood, glass—not a house.