The State of the Language: 'For the Ear Trieth Words, as the Mouth Tasteth Meat'

A BRIEF ANATOMY OF LITERISH

BY Literish I mean that comparatively modern special dialect, not quite English, in which book reviews are written — not all book reviews, let us hastily and happily add, but an overwhelming majority of the fashionable ones, such as (under the right of reasonable quotation) the publishers cull choice morsels from in their advertisements.

What is the most egregious — in Literish, outstanding — of the identifying stigmata of this peculiar lingo? By general consent it is the adjectival vocabulary that constitutes the principal labor-saving device of the profession. A rollcall of the reviewers’ pet adjectives is out of the question in our space, but a brief selective list can represent them as truthfully as a lexicon. I present a few lifted from a single issue of a literary periodical, with figures in parenthesis to denote the number of times some of the most frequent appear therein: —

astonishing (6), exciting (8), unforgettable (4), brilliant (11), challenging, readable (6), arresting, delightful, effective, moving (7), thrilling (9), inspiring, amazing (5), startling (8), stimulating, indispensable, engrossing, invaluable, significant, entertaining (5), sparkling (5), revealing (7), revelatory, hair-raising, illuminating, diverting, vivid, glamorous, colorful, vibrant, provocative, memorable, captivating, breathless, breath-taking, heart-warming, gripping, haunting, rousing, stirring, disturbing, absorbing (5), biting, searching, striking, amusing (7), sympathetic, convincing, impressive, irresistible, outstanding (8), fascinating (13)

I don’t mean to say that all reviewers habitually use all of them, and, thank heaven, some reviewers use scarcely any; but no reader of reviews will need a set of graphs to persuade him that, taken together, they provide a composite and résumé of any week-end’s reading in what passes for current literary criticism. There is no single word in the lot that, e natura sua, means or remotely suggests books and writing as against any other province of human affairs; and yet if you were to show the list as a whole to fifty reading persons and ask them to state what province of affairs it suggests, at least forty-seven of them would answer in chorus, ’Book reviews!’ To such an extent has the practice of this learned profession become reduced to standardization and cant.

Now, what family resemblance do the items of this rather strange vocabulary share? What is their dominant common characteristic? One familiar answer is that they are worn-out, threadbare words, victims of so much heedless wear and tear as to have lost all usefulness to a self-respecting writer. Stale they certainly are; yet I doubt that this observation quite accounts for the cumulative blight that is upon them as a class. (Probably most of us tend to overvalue mere novelty of diction, anyway.) What more deeply damns them is the very aforesaid fact that they are not words expressly about books and writing at all. They are words about readers and the experience of reading — impression-words, emotion-words, ego-words, registering nothing but the critic’s claim to sensitivity.

He deposes that a given work or chapter or passage is revealing. To tell us anything about it as communication he would have to say what it reveals, and to whom. Making the word a sort of general shorthand for his favorable impression, he has only told us an irrelevant fact about himself; a confidence in the class of ‘ I enjoy winter sports.’ I assure you in fluent Literish that a book is moving, thrilling, inspiring, haunting, disturbing. All I have really disclosed is that I profess to be moved, thrilled, inspired, haunted, disturbed. What of it? Why should you care? I have put myself in your way, and to get at the book via this detour you would have to know me as few people know even themselves. It is asking you to go a long way around for an uncertain reward.

The worst of it is, you cannot even be sure that these stock emotion-words record any emotions truly felt by the critics themselves. The whole of Literish is shot through with a subtle dye of insincerity. Seven times in eight the fellow who describes a work as deeply moving just means that he thinks he ought to be moved by it, or that he would have been moved if he had come upon it when he was younger and had not read so many books, or that he can imagine more simple and less calloused readers as being moved by it. Many a book that he calls indispensable on Saturday he sells to the bookstore for a quarter on Monday. Of many a romance that he describes as unforgettable he will say within a few weeks: ‘Let’s see, wasn’t that the one about — what was it about?’ His favorite cliché is to promise you that, having read a certain book, you can never be the same person again; but he is the same person, and he continues by the week and the year, as book follows book, to go through the motions that are expected of him and to write the same impressionistic review in the same Literish.

The late Anatole France took on much to be answerable for when he composed the epigram, ‘The good critic is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.’ This celebrated definition has simply taught a horde of persons who feel little or nothing about imaginative literature to pretend that they have souls, that the reading of books is their souls’ great adventure, and that every season’s list of every publishing house (12,000 new works a year in America alone) is sown with masterpieces — in short, to be book reviewers. Of the results produced by the rank and file of them no truer word can ever be spoken than that pronounced by Joseph Conrad when he called the typical weekly review ‘a feat of agility on the part of a trained pen running in a desert.’

THE DRAGNET

FORCE AND CULTURE. An injunction by unsigned postcard adjures me: —

Add to your list of words misused these four: cultured, cultivated (are we cultivated gentlemen, like good vegetables?), forceful, forcible. (Do you write in a forcible way? Do I? Only when I try to ‘cram it down someone’s throat.’ I find that most writers call either the delivery of a speech or the feeding of a prisoner forcible; one would suppose the former to be forceful.)

Alas, this anonymous gentleman will have to get his aid and comfort elsewhere, for it is my opinion that he is being stern about distinctions that lack all support but that of a personal fancy. Forceful means characterized by force — yes; but so does forcible, when it does not mean compulsory. Why not, in a language in which bark is the integument of a tree, the conversation of a dog, and a vessel of a certain rig? Cultured means having culture, and cultivated means having cultivation. Like good vegetables? Why, yes, precisely. The cultivation of vegetables involves the suppression of weeds, the enrichment of the soil, just enough loosening to let roots grow, and just enough firming to make roots hold — altogether a perfect and profound account of what happens in the well-cared-for mind. A mere metaphor, this? Well, how much of language is, at bottom, anything but metaphor?

WILSON FOLLETT