Author: Isaac

Contact, Verb

From Wilson Follett (1966), Modern American Usage (ed. Jacques Barzun)

Persons old enough to have been repelled by the verb contact when it was still a crude neologism may as well make up their minds that there is no way to arrest or reverse the tide of its popularity. Persons young enough to have picked up the word without knowing that anyone had reservations about it may as well make up their minds that a considerable body of their elders abominate it and would despise themselves if they succumbed to the temptation to use it. In this converted noun we have the perfect example of a coinage that has thirty or forty more years of intolerance to face from a dwindling minority of conservatives while enjoying the full approval — and, more important, the increasing use — of a growing majority that will eventually be unanimous. This clash of generations — a forlorn cultural resistance or a healthy disposition to make the most of linguistic growth, according to how you look at it — is one of the standard phenomena of change.

If in doubt, contact your physician — this locution is as natural to the American of thirty as it is grotesque to the American of sixty, for whom the idea of surfaces touching is the essence of contact. The elderly can therefore see no fitness and no use for the word in its new sense, when the vocabulary already provides consult, ask, approach, get in touch with, confer with, and simply see. Their juniors can perceive no point in forgoing so plainly useful an invention.

The conservative retains one advantage: no one insists that he must use contact, and if he sticks to consult and other inconspicuous synonyms no one will even notice his abstention. But this argument is unlikely to persuade the addicts of contact, who exploit the word because it sounds brisk and comprehensive.

Two other ‘vogue words’ in the same category of nouns converted into verbs for ‘dynamic’ reasons are implement and process. A plan or program is implemented when supplied with the practical apparatus — appropriations, staff, schedule, or what not — needed to carry it out. The word is perhaps a shade less harsh than contact, very likely because of its analogy with tool and retool, standard words for a factory’s preparing to undertake new or increased production. With implement the layman can sound technical. As for the second word, an application, request, memorandum, or some other document is processed when it goes through the usual sequence of consideration, approval, and execution. The word sounds as if it should mean something more exact than considered, appraised, weighed, handled, studied, dealt with, etc., but does it?

It is to be noted that all three of these currently fashionable verbs — contact, implement, process — belong to the proliferating vocabulary of bureaucratic organization, the patter of officialdom. This is a linguistic medium that practically everyone not immersed in it systematically mocks, but meanwhile its toxic properties undermine our resistance, and in the end contemporary speech becomes, regardless of the occasion, more and more bureaucratic.

Nicolás Gómez Dávila

From Scholia to an Implicit Text

Democratic parliaments are not sites for debate but places where the people’s absolutism records its edicts.

The authenticity of the feeling depends on the clarity of the idea.

Refusing to admire is the token of the beast.

The more serious the problems, the greater the number of incompetents democracy summons to solve them.

For a democrat, freedom does not entail being able to say all he thinks but not having to think all he says.

As the waters of this century rise, delicate and noble feelings, voluptuous and fine pleasures, discreet and profound ideas take shelter in certain unique souls, like the survivors of the Flood upon a few silent summits.

Boundless tolerance is nothing but a hypocritical form of surrender.

Human warmth diminishes in a society as its legislation is perfected.

For fools, obsolete opinion and wrong opinion are synonymous.

Modern man is certain that he lives amidst a pluralism of opinions, whereas what prevails today is an asphyxiating unanimity.

Public political debate is not intellectually adult in any country.

A politician never says what he believes to be true, but what he deems to be effective.

Not one of the summit historical ages has been planned. Reformers can only be credited with mistakes.

The secret yearning of every civilised society is not to abolish inequality but to educate it.

The problem of increasing economic inflation would have a solution if modern mentality did not oppose an invincible resistance to any attempt to restrict human greed.

Modern mentality is a child of human pride inflated by commercial advertising.

Modern machines are every day more complicated, and modern man is every day more elementary.

What proves most striking about modern enterprises is the incongruity between the hugeness and intricacy of the technological paraphernalia and the almost nothingness of the end products.

When the populace awakes, first they shriek, then get drunk, plunder, murder, and finally go back to sleep.

A limitless naivety is required to be able to believe that the improvement of any social condition may be otherwise than slow, gradual, and unprompted.

Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust contrive a thousand ideologies to justify themselves.

Nothing is so important that it does not matter how 1t is written.

Writing is the only way of putting some distance between oneself and the century one had no choice but to be born in.

E. M. Forster on Desmond MacCarthy

Published as a Pamphlet in 1952, by the Mill House Press

I have not many recollections of the early Desmond MacCarthy, but fortunately I can clearly remember the first time we met. It was about fifty years ago, in Cambridge, and at one of those little discussion-societies which are constantly being born and dying inside the framework of the university. They still continue, I am glad to say, and I know that he too would be glad.

This particular society was called the Apennines. Its invitation-card displayed a range of mountains, and there was also a pun involved, upon which I will not expatiate. I had to read a paper to the Apennines, then I was pulled to pieces, and among my critics was a quiet, dark young man with a charming voice and manner, who sat rather far back in the room, and who for all his gentleness knew exactly what he wanted to say, and in the end how to say it. That was my first impression of him, and I may say it is my last impression also. The young man became an old one and a famous one, but he remained charming and gentle, he always knew his own mind, and he always sat rather far back in the room. Compare him in this respect with that trenchant critic Mr. So-and-So, or with that chatty columnist Sir Somebody Everything, who always manage to sit well in front. I do not think it was modesty on Desmond’s part that made him retiring. He just knew where he wanted to be. Some years after the Apennines, when he was doing literary journalism, he chose for a pseudonym the name “Affable Hawk.” Nothing could have been more apt. He was affable to his fellow writers, whenever possible. But if a book was shallow or bumptious or brutal, then down pounced the hawk, and the victim’s feathers flew.

He and I were always friendly and I stayed with him in Suffolk in those far-off days, and elsewhere later on, but all my vivid memories of him are in a group with other people. So let us now move from Cambridge to London. There, in the early years of this century, I remember a peculiar organisation which had been formed for the purpose of making Desmond write his novel. He wanted to write his novel. He could talk his novel – character, plot, incidents, all were fascinating; I recall a green valley in Wales where a famous picture had got hidden: but he could not get his novel on to paper. So some of his friends thought that if a society was formed at which we all wrote novels and read a fresh chapter aloud at each meeting, Desmond would be reluctantly dragged down the path of creation. Needless to say, he eluded so crude a device. Other people wrote their novels – which usually began well and fell to bits in the second chapter. He – he had forgotten, he had mislaid the manuscript, he had not the time. And he did not write his novel. And after the first world war the group was reconstituted: not to write novels but to write reminiscences.

Here Desmond was supreme. “Memory,” he often said, “is an excellent compositor.” And in the midst of a group which included Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes, he stood out in his command of the past, and in his power to rearrange it. I remember one paper of his in particular – if it can be called a paper. Perched away in a corner of Duncan Grant’s studio, he had a suit-case open before him. The lid of the case, which he propped up, would be useful to rest his manuscript upon, he told us. On he read, delighting us as usual, with his brilliancy, and humanity, and wisdom, until – owing to a slight wave of his hand – the suit-case unfortunately fell over. Nothing was inside it. There was no paper, no manuscript. He had been improvising.

and/or

From Wilson Follett (1966), Modern American Usage (ed. Jacques Barzun)

Whether a lawyer can or cannot make out a case for the necessity of this ungraceful expression in legal documents only a lawyer is competent to say; but anyone else is entitled to the view that it has no right to intrude in ordinary prose. One such intrusion may stand for all: A majority of the tourists come here with camping and/or fishing on their minds. Suppose this to be written with camping or fishing on their minds. How will any sensible reader interpret it? He will presume that some camp without fishing, some fish without camping, and some do both, nothing being said or implied to prevent the three equal possibilities. Note, besides, that these possibilities would be the same if and alone had been used.

We see in this example one of the usual effects of borrowing phraseology from the professions: it kills the plain sense of the words formerly deemed adequate by the layman. That plain sense in the sentence under review is that and can sometimes suggest or, and that generally or includes and. The weatherman’s Snow or sleet tomorrow is no guarantee that we shall have only the one or the other. For generations the chairman has asked Are there corrections or additions to the minutes? well knowing that there may be both. The phrase either… or was invented for situations in which it is important to exclude one of a pair. To be sure, in casual speech you or I must go carries the meaning either you or I; but If he tries that stunt he will be hurt or killed makes it clear that the inclusion of and in or arises naturally from the facts and is habitual for most readers.

Indeed, if the users of and/or were as logical as they pretend to be when they insist on the legalism, they would have to say and or or, since their assumption is that the two cannot co-exist. That assumption is not made better by the punctuation in well, then, there’s Mackenzie and, or, his associates. And if a writer thinks his readers have been so corrupted by the abuse of and/or as to misunderstand his simple or, he should courageously repudiate the hybrid and write – using our first example – tourists come here to camp or fish or both. Let him remember that, except for lawyers, English speakers and writers have managed to express this simple relationship without and/or for over six centuries. This truth is commemorated in the couplet:

Had he foreseen the modern use of and/оr,

It would have sickened Walter Savage Landor.

The Blessing of an Orderly Mind

From Wilson Follett (1966), Modern American Usage (ed. Jacques Barzun)

Wherever we can make twenty-five words do the work of fifty, we halve the area in which looseness and disorganization can flourish, and by reducing the span of attention required we increase the force of the thought. To make our words count for as much as possible is surely the simplest as well as the hardest secret of style. Its difficulty consists in the ceaseless pursuit of the thousand ways of rectifying our mistakes, eliminating our inaccuracies, and replacing our falsities — in a word, editing our prose. When we can do this habitually (even though it never becomes easy) we shall find ourselves honoring the faculty that can do more toward this end than a mastery of prescriptive grammar, more than the study of etymology and semantics, more than an observance of idiom and the maxims of rhetoric. And what is this faculty? It is the blessing of an orderly mind.

Inside Talk

From Theodore Bernstein (1965), The Careful Writer

Unfortunately, all the words that describe the kinds of specialized language that fall within this classification have connotations that range from faintly to strongly disparaging. That is why the neutral label inside talk has been affixed to them. The subclassifications are these:

Argot: the speech of thieves and rogues, and, by derived meaning, the speech of any particular class of persons.

Jargon: originally meaningless, unintelligible speech, but now also the language of a science, sect, trade, profession, or the like.

Lingo: in contemptuous reference, the speech of foreigners or of a special class of persons.

Slang: current language below the level of standard usage employing new words or old words in new ways; a language that may or may not be peculiar to a particular class.

The reason that all these words have disparaging connotations is that outsiders dislike being outsiders. They envy or resent those who can speak and understand inside talk. And in some instances the very desire to keep outsiders out accounts for these languages: it is certainly the reason behind argot, it is often the reason behind slang, and it is sometimes the reason behind jargon. There is a tendency in specialized groups, for reasons of either establishing a kind of mystic bond or asserting a kind of self-importance, to employ esoteric or pretentious words. It is difficult to see, for instance, what function is performed for the psychologist by instinctual that is not just as well performed by instinctive; what function is performed for the sociologist by target ends that is not just as well performed by goals; what function is performed for the pedagogue by subject area and classroom situation and classroom teacher that is not just as well performed by subject and classroom and teacher.

This is by no means to say that all inside talk, all jargon, is pretentious and useless. On the contrary, most of it is highly necessary. Those in specialized fields have need to communicate with one another in precise terms and with an economy of expression. A single word will often convey to a colleague what would require a sentence, a paragraph, or perhaps an even longer description to convey to a layman. The fact that the layman does not comprehend the single word does not indict it for use within its proper sphere.

With the onward march of education, however, the layman comes to comprehend more and more of the jargon of the specialties. In this way more and more useful words enter the language of the ordinary man and the language is enriched. But there is a danger here. It often happens that the layman does not exactly comprehend the specialized word or phrase he is taking over from the specialist, and the word comes into the language with an erroneous meaning so that thenceforth it becomes an ambiguous expression. In economics, for instance, the phrase economy of scarcity has a well defined meaning; it refers to a deliberate creation of scarcity to drive prices up. But during World War II one of our newspaper military analysts, who had heard but not understood the phrase, applied it as a description of mere shortages of ammunition or ships or blankets or what not. The terms of psychoanalysis have suffered the most at the hands of lay writers and lay conversationalists. The cause is undoubtedly twofold: first, there is such an abundance of those terms; second, psychoanalysis has become fashionable in literature and conversation. Thus, complex is often used as if it meant a mere psychological peculiarity, fixation as if it meant an obsession, exhibitionism as if it meant showing off. And there are a host of other Freudian terms that are habitually misused because they are only half understood

A pointed text for this particular sermon might be the following passage from Ngaio Marsh’s Death of a Peer:

“What do you think of me?” asked Frid, striking an attitude. “Aren’t I quite lovely?”

“Don’t tell her she is,” said Colin. “The girl’s a nymphomaniac…

“My dear Colin,” said his father, “it really would be a good idea if you’d stick to the words you understand.”

A final caution may be of value in a discussion of inside talk. In writing intended for general reading the use, whether by a specialist or by a layman, of jargon terms that are not commonly understood smacks of pedantry. If the writer believes that it is imperative to use such a term, he should at least explain it when it is introduced. It must never be forgotten that the function of writing is communication.

Windyfoggery

From Theodore Bernstein (1965), The Careful Writer

In nature wind and fog do not normally coexist. In language, however, they sometimes do, and the greater the wind the more impenetrable the fog. This linguistic condition may be thought of as windyfoggery. It embraces gobbledygook, that wordy, involved, and often unintelligible language usually associated with bureaucracy and big business. But it also includes the self-important circumlocution of ordinary orators, the pretentious pseudoscientific jargon of the pseudosciences, and the monumental unintelligibility of some criticism of those arts that do not readily accept the bridle of plain words.

There have been many translations into windyfoggery of well known pieces of simple writing — passages from the Bible, from Lincoln, from Shakespeare — and there have been many parodies in windyfoggery of ordinary thoughts. One illustration will bring out the point. Prof. Lionel Trilling of Columbia takes the statement “They fell in love and married” and translates it thus: “Their libidinal impulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated them within the same frame of reference.” A contrived example, to be sure; but is it much different from writing, “improved financial support and less onerous work loads,” when one wishes to say, “more pay and less work”? Or is it much different from writing, “The supervision of driver and safety education at the state and local levels should be assigned to personnel qualified by virtue of their adequate personal characteristics and specialized training and experience in this field,” when all that is being said is that good teachers are needed?

Turn now, if you will, to art criticism. This is the kind of thing you sometimes find: “Motherwell seems to have several kinds of courage; one of them is the courage to monumentalize the polymorphous-perverse world of his inner quickenings; he is the architect of a lyrical anxiety where Gorky was its master scrivener; the liquefied tick of Gorky’s id-clock becomes in Motherwell the resonant Versaillean tock, the tall duration of a muralizing necessity that strains to leap its pendulum’s arc while carrying a full weight of iconographic potency.”

Pseudoscientific writing occasionally includes this sort of observation: “A factor analysis of the scale scores has yielded six attitude clusters that make sense intuitively and that resemble factors found in other job satisfaction studies.” Or this type of definition (this one is a definition of reading presented by a professor of educational psychology): “A processing skill of symbolic reasoning, sustained by the interfacilitation of an intricate hierarchy of substrata factors that have been mobilized as a psychological working system and pressed into service in accordance with the purpose of the reader.” Let us mobilize our substrata factors and proceed.

Dr. William B. Bean, who in the Archives of Internal Medicine often tilted a lancet at the writing operations of his fellow healers, has passed on the story of a New York plumber who had cleaned out some drains with hydrochloric acid and then wrote to a chemical research bureau, inquiring, “Was there any possibility of harm?” As told by Dr. Bean, the story continues:

“The first answer was, ‘The efficacy of hydrochloric acid is indisputably established but the corrosive residue is incompatible with metallic permanence.’ The plumber was proud to get this and thanked the people for approving of his method. The dismayed research bureau rushed another letter to him saying, ‘We cannot assume responsibility for the production of a toxic and noxious residue with hydrochloric acid. We beg leave to suggest to you the employment of an alternative procedure.’ The plumber was more delighted than ever and wrote to thank them for reiterating their approval. By this time the bureau got worried about what might be happening to New York’s sewers and called in a third man, an older scientist, who wrote simply, ‘Don’t use hydrochloric acid. It eats hell out of pipes.'”

Windyfoggery may result from sheer pomposity. It may result from a kind of wistful desire to make learned sounds. It may result from an incapacity for direct, clear thinking. Or it may result from incomplete knowledge of one’s subject, which leads one to wrap a paucity of information in a plethora of words. Jargon may be useful for communication between members of the same profession. But windyfoggery, which often is jargon gone wrong and blanketed in blurriness, is not useful to any purpose.

The Prophet

Translated from the Russian of Pushkin by Maurice Baring

With fainting soul athirst for Grace,
I wandered in a desert place,
And at the crossing of the ways
I saw the sixfold Seraph blaze;
He touched mine eyes with fingers light
As sleep that cometh in the night:
And like a frighted eagle’s eyes,
They opened wide with prophecies.
He touched mine ears, and they were drowned
With tumult and a roaring sound:
I heard convulsion in the sky,
And flights of angel hosts on high,
And beasts that move beneath the sea,
And the sap creeping in the tree.
And bending to my mouth he wrung
From out of it my sinful tongue,
And all deceit and idle rust,
And ’twixt my lips a-perishing
A subtle serpent’s forked sting
With Right hand wet with blood he thrust.
And with his sword my breast he cleft,
My quaking heart thereout he reft,
And in the yawning of my breast
A coal of living fire he pressed.
Then in the desert I lay dead,
And God called unto me and said:
“Arise, and let My voice be heard,
Charged with My Will go forth and span
The land and sea, and let My Word
Lay waste with fire the heart of man.”

(Published in Life and Letters, 1931, vol. VII, no. 39.)

I did not know Montaigne from Adam

“Where the development of talent is concerned we are still in the food-gathering stage. We do not know how to grow it. Up to now in this country when one of the masses starts to write, paint, etc., it is because he happens to bump into the right accident. In my case the right accident happened in the 1930s. I had the habit of reading from childhood, but very little schooling. I spent half of my adult life as a migratory worker and the other half as a longshoreman. The Hitler decade started me thinking, but there is an enormous distance between thinking and the act of writing. I had to acquire a taste for a good sentence — taste it the way a child tastes candy — before I stumbled into writing. Here is how it happened. Late in 1936 I was on my way to do some placer mining near Nevada City, and I had a hunch that I would get snowbound. I had to get me something to read, something that would last me for a long time. So I stopped over in San Francisco to get a thick book. I did not really care what the book was about — history, theology, mathematics, farming, anything, so long as it was thick, had small print and, no pictures. There was at that time a large secondhand bookstore on Market Street called Lieberman’s and I went there to buy my book. I soon found one. It had about a thousand pages of small print and no pictures. The price was one dollar. The title page said these were The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. I knew what essays were but I did not know Montaigne from Adam. I put the book in my knapsack and caught the ferry to Sausalito. Sure enough, I got snowbound. I read the book three times until I knew it almost by heart. When I got back to the San Joaquin Valley I could not open my mouth without quoting Montaigne, and the fellows liked it. It got so whenever there was an argument about anything — women, money, animals, food, death—they would ask: ‘What does Montaigne say?’ Out came the book and I would find the right passage. I am quite sure that even now there must be a number of migratory workers up and down the San Joaquin Valley still quoting Montaigne. I ought to add that the Montaigne edition I had was the John Florio translation. The spelling was modem, but the style seventeenth century — the style of the King James Bible and of Bacon’s Essays. The sentences have hooks in them which stick in the-mind; they make platitudes sound as if they were new. Montaigne was not above anyone’s head. Once in a workers’ barrack near Stockton, the man in the next bunk picked up my Montaigne and read it for an hour or so. When he returned it he said: ‘Anyone can write a book like this’.”(Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time)

A Mountain

Barzun, A Stroll with William James

Anyone brought up in the Alps and taking trips among them knows that “a mountain” is never twice the same — in shape, color, and “character.” It is “one thing” by a fiat helped by a name.

Bagehot, “The Metaphysical Basis of Toleration”

Human character is a most complex thing, and the impressions which different people form of it are as various as the impressions which the inhabitants of an impassable mountain have of its shape and size. Each observer has an aggregate idea derived from certain actions and certain sayings, but the real man has always or almost always said a thousand sayings of a kind quite different and in a connection quite different; he has done a vast variety of actions among “other men” and “other minds”; a mobile person will often seem hardly the same if you meet him in very different societies. And how, except by discussion, is the true character of such a person to be decided? Each observer must bring his contingent to the list of data; those data must be arranged and made use of. The certain and positive facts as to which every one is agreed must have their due weight; they must be combined and compared with the various impressions as to which no two people exactly coincide. A rough summary must be made of the whole. In no other way is it possible to arrive at the truth of the matter. Without discussion each mind is dependent on its own partial observation. A great man is one image — one thing, so to speak — to his valet, another to his son, another to his wife, another to his greatest friend. None of these must be stereotyped; all must be compared. To prohibit discussion is to prohibit the corrective process.