The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deterioriated like motor-car tyres; they have like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.
—Henry James, American novelist and critic, The New York Times, March 21, 1915