The State of the Language: 'For the Ear Trieth Words, as the Mouth Tasteth Meat'
MAIL-ORDER ENGLISH IS PLENTY SWISHY
THE great and ramified house of Sears, Roebuck and Co. (Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Atlanta, Memphis, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle) last fall broadcast one of its periodic seasonal catalogues for what it called a ‘Backto-School and Harvest Event.’ (You will doubtless have observed that what used to be a crass and lowly mark-down sale is now an event; also that its individual items have become values or numbers, as in ‘this snappy little number.’) One of the snappiest little numbers listed therein is a piece of footgear called the Swingaroo — a name possibly compounded of swing plus kangaroo — and further explained by the subcaption Jitterbug Sensation. It is worthily hymned in the following prose poem:
Your feet come in for the biggest share of attention when you’re swingin’ in the groove to a hep-cat tune. They’ve got to be fast and free. They’ve got to be fresh and comfortable, no matter how fast the action. You can keep ‘em in step with ‘Swingeroos’ [the mail-order trade name is often differently spelled in caption and copy] — they’re made for comfort and for hard wear. And they’ll take all the punishment you can give ‘em. Plenty swishy, too, with lots of funny sayings printed on the natural color bark-tanned leather uppers. You’ll bounce with every drum-beat in the firm-gripping crepe rubber soles and heels.
Among the funny sayings shown as printed on the natural color bark-tanned leather uppers are Hotsy Totsy, Take a Powder, Baloni, Lam, Your [You’re?] Out, I’ll Mow Ya Down, In the Doghouse, and Aw Nerts. One of the metal-rimmed eyelets is labeled Porthole, and to another an arrow refers the mot A Great Tie-Up. On this union of mere footwear with pithy reading matter the last word is: ‘At this low price, you’ll not want to be without them another day.’
Meanwhile, by school and tutor, by textbook and library, by precept and examination and example, we encourage our young to enjoy good reading, to respect sound speech, to know decent writing when they see it and become able to do it themselves.
THE DRAGNET
BY, WITH. A member of the banking profession who believes (as I do) that ’oldfashioned English grammar, with all its faults, had value ‘ writes to call attention to ‘the habitual misuse’ of these two prepositions. He says: —
I was taught that by denotes the actor, and with the instrument. ‘The dog was killed by a man with a club.’ The misuse usually occurs after passive verbs, but in many of these illustrations the verb is active.
He then cites a number of contexts from Sloane’s Life of Napoleon, Trevelyan’s George III and Charles James Fox, Van Tyne’s War of Independence, and Our New Ways of Thinking, by George Boas; e.g., ‘when a nail is struck by a hammer,”Fox began by a powerful justification,’ ‘hit on the head by a brick,’ ‘Mrs. Greene celebrated the occasion by a dance.’
Possibly [he concludes] I am making a mountain out of a molehill, but it seems to me that attention to these little details is a mark of the discriminating user of English. I read very few books whose pages are not littered with what seems to me to be a misuse of by. — CHARLES C. WHITE, Cleveland, Ohio
My own discrimination may be defective here, but I am unable to go quite so far as my correspondent does, though I should be the last to call his point a molehill. The Webster on my table tells me that ‘by emphasizes the idea of agency; with, that of instrument.’ There is an area in which with is nearly or quite obligatory (‘hit on the head with a brick’), and another in which by is as clearly called for (‘a telegraph key pressed by the Chief Executive’). But between them there is a misty mid-region, possibly more extensive than either, in which we have a legitimate option. Mr. White discountenances Trevelyan’s ‘good fame bespattered by calumnies’; but is it not exactly of a piece with ‘hating even the garment spotted by the flesh,’ in the Epistle of Jude? ‘They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony’ (Revelation XII. 11): is not that logically and rhetorically equal to Van Tyne’s ‘overwhelmed them by the roars which so frightened his Boswell’?
And then we must not forget the illogical potency of idiom. We speak of going by train, bus, airplane, and the object of the preposition is clearly instrument, not actor. It is useful to perceive that with ‘emphasizes the idea of’ instrument, but as soon as you assert that it means the idea of instrument and nothing else, or that by cannot denote instrument at all, you have put your foot into a trap. In language as elsewhere we have to distinguish between a broad tendency and an absolute law.
FLAIR. One small but conclusive proof that the Atlantic is widely read with a microscope is the number of times my mail has confronted me with Mr. Alexander Woollcott’s remarks in the Reader’s Digest on this borrowing from the French. I earned the demonstration, quite outside this department, by describing a boy as having ‘a flair for mathematics.’ The first reproach to reach me was contained in a letter to the Atlantic itself. After quoting my use of the word it went on: —
Mr. Woollcott says: ‘On the lips of anyone who cares enough about his vocabulary to keep it in good working condition, flair . . . can only mean a capacity to detect. . . . Yet within the past five years there has spread like the flu the fou habit of using it interchangeably with knack or aptitude or gift.’ What does the Atlantic say? — GERTRUDE W. PAGE, LOS Angeles, California
The Atlantic was good enough to say that I had been quite within my dictionary rights (‘taste combined with aptitude; liking; bent’) and that even the French word is listed in one dictionary as meaning acumen, keenness, as well as scent. This is presumably enough to excuse me from joining Mr. Woollcott’s proposed ‘society of which the members agree to shoot — and shoot to kill — all persons caught misusing the word flair.’ Is it, however, enough to justify my continuing to use the word in the way he objects to? Not according to my own principles of clean writing, which require (1) that we conscientiously spare the reader avoidable anguish and (2) that, having the option, we hold words to what they naturally and centrally mean, eschewing the uses that are no better than defensible or permissive. I shall not shoot anybody for claiming his technical right to either use of flair, but Mr. Woollcott and his vigilantes may stand me against the wall if I use it again in the way that rasps them. I had rather give up forever a round hundred better words than flair, all of them admissible, than jar without need the sensibilities of anyone who cares enough about words to have pet aversions of which he can set down a cogent account. That is where I part company with some of our fashionable libertarians in language. They think English is most strengthened by all manner of ingenious extensions and proliferations of meaning. I think it is most strengthened, at any rate at the present time, by accuracy, selection, self-criticism, and self-discipline — all of which imply and include judicious renunciation.
WILSON FOLLETT