The State of the Language

‘For the ear trieth words, as the mouth tasteth meat’

WHO IS WHOM

MR. LIVINGSTON WELCH, a well-known university lecturer who reviews in the field of psychiatry for the New York Times, has been taken to task in print for the sentence ‘It was Moses the Egyptian whom Freud believes created the character of the Jews,’ which occurred in his review of Moses and Monotheism. A novel that I greatly admire, Mr. Chard Powers Smith s Artillery of Time, has these constructions: ‘They consider themselves . . . vastly superior to all Yankees, whom they persuade themselves are something lower than their poor whites,’ and ‘Lorinda Fulton, as the wife of the Squire whom she suspected had already been insulted.’ Possibly you noticed, in the Contributors Column of June 1930, Laura Fullerton Gilbert’s sprightly letter in rhyme on the subject of those who ‘use whom when they mean who.’ And do not imagine that there is anything peculiarly cisatlantic in the prevalence of this little slip. In Miss Edith Sitwell and in Mr. Joseph Hone, the official biographer of George Moore, I have come upon whom’s as wild as any.

The rationale of the construction that always produces whom for who is instantly clear if we show visually that the verb and its subject are parenthetical, interpolated: ‘who, Freud believes, created the character of the Jews’; ‘who (they persuade themselves) are something lower than their poor whites’; ‘who — she suspected — had already been insulted.’ Here it is in eighth-grade syntax: —

‘Those whom I hoped might be my auditors,’ wrote Mr. A. Edward Newton. The whom is a consequence of hastily taking the pronoun for the object of the verb hoped, which is what it sounds like. Actually, it is the subject of might be and must therefore be in the nominative — who. The object of hoped is what, then? Why, the whole substantive clause who [= that they] might be my auditors.

Wild who’s are not quite so common among the literate, but even they exist. A recent note of one has come from Miss Mary E. Curtiss, of Rochester, New York: —

I should be chary of reporting that Mr. Van Gelder ‘says’ this: all we can be sure of, in default of the manuscript, is that it is what a compositor set. There is, however, nothing inherently improbable in such a who; liberal grammarians now frankly argue for ‘ Who do you think you’re talking to? ‘ They remind me somehow of Bierce’s owls,

THE DRAGNET

MORE ABOUT ‘-IZE’ A startling number of correspondents, since I offered some remarks on this hard-working suffix, have expressed consternation because the Atlantic officially uses serialize and even extends it to the substantive form serialization. Well, why should the Atlantic not? -Ize is an inalienable part of the language, as well as a very useful one in its place, and it may fairly be added to any syllabic base that lends itself thereto with an effect not revolting to either the ear or the mind, whether the resultant term is in dictionaries or not. Serialize has been a standard word in the editorial vocabulary for decades. It has an unmistakable meaning and a smooth rhythm, and I should (and do) call it a first-rate example of what this indispensable suffix was given to us for. As for serialization — certainly no honeyed lyric among words — the excuse for it is hinted in the avowal of one correspondent who says that she has struggled long but vainly to hit upon an Anglo-Saxon substitute. If the word is unpleasing, the reason has little or nothing to do with its buried -ize. What six-syllable word in -ation escapes being a jawbreaker?

All that I wished to call attention to is the hideous result of calling upon -ize as a miscellaneous labor-saving device, in the way of some persons who try to perform any small mechanical operation with a screwdriver. A New York City correspondent, Miss Julia C. Stimson, credits Teachers College, Columbia University, with the use of concretize and abstractize. The intelligence finds these unexceptionable; they merely dismay the ear. For an example of -ize really pushed into the region of the fantastic we can turn to such exhibits as a recent question-andanswer advertisement by the firm of Bonwit Teller, sent me from Forest Hills, New York, by Mrs. John Russell Carty. One of the questions is: ‘How can I be accessorized in one place?’ — meaning, I take it, gloved, handbagged, necklaced, and so on. The answer, prompt and pat: ‘In our Accessory Lounge, famous for its head-to-toe accessorizing.’ My correspondent reports that this was ‘read aloud amid exclamations of horror by the visiting firemen.’

And that is about as far as I can reach in this direction without collaboration from the head of the distinguished Taft School, who writes: —

I read with interest your reference to the linguistic atrocities which have re-
sulted from adding -ize wherever it seems to be convenient. It brought to my
mind a man who had just been elected mayor of a Western city on a reform
ticket, one of the reforms promised having been in the matter of the crooked
streets. The new mayor said that the first job of his administration would be to
paralyze the streets. — HORACE D. TAFT,Watertown, Connecticut

FOOTNOTE ON JARGON. From far and wide come reminders that this department’s observations on the art of swanky circumlocution have hardly scratched the surface of the topic. One of them says: —

My favorite example is found on the container of a well-known commercial
product, stated to beefficacious for artificial dentures. Surely good for false teeth
would be as adequate a description! — MIRIAM KELLY,Chicago

WASHABLE. Apropos of the troublemaking and ambiguous suffix -able, ponder this annotation from the University of Nebraska: —

Your reference to Dean Briggs’s non-leakable pen reminded me of the washable
ink sold nowadays. Not long ago the cleaners and I puzzled for some time over an
inkspot on my dress. Did washable mean wash-out-able or the opposite? Though
the ad implied that the ink was permanent, the spot came out.

— M. J. MEREDITH,Lincoln, Nebraska

It is a recent convention to use washable (of ink) as the opposite of indelible, but if we are not misled it is only because we happen to know the convention, not because the word says what it means and nothing else. Used of the dye in a dress, washable claims imperviousness to water: why, then, should it claim the opposite virtue in ink? Here is one more of the little perversities of a language in which valuable and invaluable, bend and unbend, are not antonyms but synonyms.

WILSON FOLLETT