The Counterfeiters
by JACQUES BARZUN
1
SOME months ago in these pages I said that a people’s adoption of new words or phrases usually revealed something about the state of culture and the temper of the times, and I instanced the verb “to contact” as implying certain evil passions in the users. I was, of course, exaggerating for emphasis; just enough, apparently, to provoke a number of challenges to explain myself, which now bring me back to the subject.
The theme is not a trivial one. We have only to remember the role that fit words played in the war leadership of our late President and Mr. Churchill to recognize that language — mere phrasing — is a powerful, indeed an indispensable instrument of government. Expression is not, as lazy people think, an optional frill, a luxury added to the plain substance of a fixed meaning. Meaning is never fixed, not even after it is incarnate in words, for these once uttered have yet to be understood. And since understanding requires that speaker and listener possess a common fund of ideas, associations, and usages, the relation between linguistic and political unity is close and reciprocal.
This is the reason why Milton, master of the two arts of poetry and politics, put the keeper of words next in rank to the keeper of the state, affirming that in a country where speech is “unhandsome . . . offensive . . . debased and wrongly uttered,” the inhabitants are “already prepared for any amount of servility.” And in a happy image that has a modern ring, he calls for a “detective police of ears” to help preserve native idiom and native freedom.
We need this policing more than ever. With only occasional rousing from our public men, we are all too likely to sink into the morass of Business English. And we have more to contend with than Milton had. He fought the debasement of language due to canting religion, bad journalism, and common ignorance. We have to fight all this and Progress too: gradeschool literacy, pseudo science, advertising, and official verbosity — not to mention that silent enemy, the protective deafness we all acquire in the war of attrition between our nerves and our improved means of communication.
No wonder many of us are too tired by the end of the day to do any Miltonian detection. At the office we endure the neurotic strain of the memo, and on the ride home the car cards finish us off with their attack upon our common sense. We are then rottenripe for the radio and its propaganda. Even so, let. us not ask how soon, having become dictaphones, we shall be ready for the Dictator. Let us rather muster our forces of resistance ahead of time.
In this enterprise as in so many others, the secret of success is vigilance, and the foe to watch against is vulgarity; not what commonly goes by that name, but the vulgarity of pretense, of affectation, of false colors exhibited in speech. Mark Van Doren tells the shocking story of meeting a young soldier on a train and finding out that the boy had once had longings to be a writer. “But,” the boy explained, “I never could remember the rules.”
“What rules?” asked Mr. Van Doren.
“All the rules — like having to say ‘also’ instead of‘too.’”
This is the vulgarity instilled by the schoolmarm, out of a desire to be genteel by external application. The feeling, as Milton said, is but a step from servility, and though it did not take root in that one youth, it must have plagued dozens of others with the guilt of an imaginary offense or the search for a nonexistent refinement.
I return to my original instance, this being, again, “to contact,” which seems to me to fit into this same pattern of vulgarity: the attempt to impose on others or on oneself by verbal fraud. If I am right, it is not surprising that “contact” means so much, to both users and abstainers. “Contact,” says Nero Wolfe to someone who found the usage sanctioned by a dictionary, “is not a verb under this roof.” Why not?
Since Wolfe does not say, let me list the bare associations aroused in my mind as I think of the word: “contact” is like “process” when applied to human beings — a would-be technical term, vague, important, “scientific.” Like “funeralize,” which means “bury” plus all the gadgetry, “contact” suggests elaborate contrivance; all this besides the honest affectation of those who say “to music ” instead of “ to play music” and “to plane” instead of “to take a plane.”
In short, the vulgar feeling embodied in “contact” is that of false economy, of which the speaker is unreasonably proud. When you say “to contact” you are subtly sure of being up to date, professional, terse. In comparison with “contacting,” the behavior denoted by the common words — write, call, see, get in touch with, notify — seems as obsolete as a 1912 typewriter. Contacting is aggressive and masterful, whether it is done in person or by command to one’s general staff: “Contact X and tell him to go to —.”
You may argue that I am making all this up, and that most users of the word simply pick it up in current speech, with no such feelings as I describe. I disagree: however faint, the feelings are there and impel the choice which, when multiplied, makes for the word’s popularity.
Anyhow, the single word is only the representative of a species, of which the distinguishing mark is pretentiousness. See the specimen and its next of kin in a letter now before me: —
We tried this morning to contact you and tell you something about our business, thinking you might be interested to the extent of making an experiment with us. . . . Firstly, we sell one product only — men’s neckwear. Not any and every grade of neckware, but just one intensively specialized quality. For years we have been marketing this one good quality and this intensive concentration has resulted in a tie no one else seems to match at our price. . . . We urge you to check off a set as a get-acquainted proposition. This offer is an extra special example of what we can do.
This letter, in turn, is a fair sample of what grade-school literacy allied to business vulgarity can do. It is very much of the twentieth century. Note the “experiment” and the repeated “intensive” and “specialized” appeals to our imagination. The offensiveness of the letter does not consist in mere error or inelegance, nor in the desire to persuade and sell, but in the false front, the aggressive imposture “resulting in a tie.”
To clinch this point, compare two errors of syntax which superficially look alike. Shakespeare’s “the most unkindest cut of all” is tautology, and so is the advertisement “a masterpiece of unified blending” — since to blend is to unify. But whereas Shakespeare’s words pass simply as emphatic, the “unified” imparts to the other phrase a condescending, dust-in-your-eyes quality, which proclaims in fact the gullible reader’s incapacity to resist smooth threesyllable words.
Advertisers have much to answer for. No doubt the world will soon forget, among worse atrocities, that a wartime invention was sold as a “Black-out safety luminous gardenia,” but I wonder whether posterity will overlook the debased verbal instincts that allowed us to turn two admirable words — collaboration (which means working together) and appeasement (which means bringing peace into the heart) — into marks of opprobrium. We can blame the newspapers, but they act on prepared minds, and it is often a step upwards from billboard vulgarity to journalese.
2
THOUGH often decried, journalese has seldom been rightly represented. It too is vulgar because it is an imitation, but its special tone comes from what it imitates, and that is the literary imagination. For example, the Associated Press dispatcher who wrote of President Truman’s return from San Francisco wanted to leave with us a striking image of a whole chain of events. So he alluded to “the part played by the President in the drama of a United Nations conference which wrote a script for peace.” It will pass; or rather, read it again, and see what counterfeit meaning is. Away from the typewriter, the journalist knows as well as we do that scripts have nothing to do with peace, nor drama with a wordy conference in which Mr. Truman’s “part” was to come at the end and say good-bye. But the writer counted on our inattention in order to make us believe for a moment that we were sweeping the human scene with a playwright’s eye.
The born writers among journalists create and give currency to admirable phrases. But these soon become threadbare in the hands of others, too hard pressed by the needs of their trade. The man who writes all the time, as John Jay Chapman says, intensifies his mannerisms, and the mannerism of the journalist is that he plays up to the idea of the “powerful stylist,” just as the businessman who “contacts you to finalize an agreement” plays up to the idea of the Napoleon of finance.
In both, moreover, one can also detect the faint caricature of that modern hero, the scientist. Note the word “experiment” in that necktie trap, and the other suggestions of technology and “special” manufacturing skill. Journalese trades on the same kind of snobbery, and there exists besides a whole parasitical literature of pseudo science. Here, for example, is a booklet of which the absurd title — “Basketball Research in Fatigue” — is almost enough to make my point. The pretense of scientific worth is rendered by the tone of heroism: “This research is based upon sound established physiological facts. It required severe exhaustive efforts and intense prolonged periods of clerical work to correlate these figures.” Mark how “intensity” dogs our lives, and read on to the climax of jargon double strength, aping the stern precision of technical prose: “The information contained herein becomes a guide in severe physical activity for the furtherance of structural and functional health of American youth.”
How far this is from Euclid or Ostwald or Darwin, no one who reads scientific literature, past or present, needs to be told. For science, too, has its canons of style, and neglect of them opens the way to error, fraud, and confusion. Too many people assume that science is a work not of words but of facts. Indeed, some scientists themselves believe their duties end with the investigation, but fortunately, most editors of scientific journals think otherwise.
In one famous center of research, there is a qualified professional who does nothing but rewrite scientific papers; and it is well known that the Royal Society sends back annually many communications whose wisdom comes smothered in incoherence. Hence it is still necessary to argue, as did Sir Clifford Allbutt in his excellent “Notes on the Writing of Scientific Papers,” that scientific prose, like every other form of human knowledge, has to rely upon proper words in proper places.
I said “every form of human knowledge,” so as to include in my rapid survey of verbal vulgarity the important department of art criticism. To be of use, criticism must be as precise and as accountable as any other type of discourse; and because art presents human feelings in finished forms, comments upon these forms should, for clearness’ sake, be especially free of emotional falsity. We may think that this candor is automatically insured by the normal standards of professional writing: a critic could not earn his living if he wrote like a salesman. Yet this fact is no guarantee, for there is concealed as well as blatant vulgarity. Take this “appreciation” quoted from the bulletin of a great museum: “His work is rooted in the best traditions of his art. His vision is potential. His work is pure. It is direct. It does not rely upon tricks of process. In whatever he does there is applied intelligence. . . .”
What does it all mean? Who is being gulled here? “Pure” is undoubtedly the clue. To the critic of art who has never studied the art of the critic, or who is bottling up impulses toward random aggression, lhe best refuge is the pose of superior certainty. The oracle tantalizes the layman with riddles, or guillotines his rivals with double-edged words. Other artists, it is implied, are not “pure” or “direct,” not in the tradition or not “potential.” The terms depend upon the clan the critic belongs to, but they are always conjugated in the defiant mood.
All these dodges and devices suggest insecurity, both of judgment and of expressive power; hence I think it fair to conclude that the commonest emotion of the man with a pen in his hand is Fear. How will it look? What will people think? We instinctively and rightly feel that words reveal our character, breeding, and present purpose. When we suspect that any of these cannot bear the light of day, we hide behind a verbal screen — and the vulgarities spring up in our path as we run, whoever we may be: teacher, merchant, journalist, research man, or critic.
The most frightened species, because the most exposed, is of course the politician, of whom the variety Diplomat has, cut of its perpetual panic, developed a language that transcends vulgarity by being truly technical. But when in our day diplomats must address the multitude, they are bound to fall back into claptrap. Rebecca West once deplored, in a review of a book on international affairs, that the dove of peace should always speak in pigeon English. Yet what else should we expect from our most timid birds? What can they say except this kind of thing; “The genius of man has devised the plan and completed the instrument, and we fervently hope that the spirit of coöperation will always guide its operation in order to achieve its lofty aim.”
If we were more vigilant, more accustomed to exercising Milton’s detective police of ears, we would sensibly refrain from using up paper and print to record what His Excellency the Ambassador said after the conference. We would know that the man did not dare say anything, though that nothing could not be made plain. Unluckily, “plain talk” in polities is also a counterfeit, made up of short dull words that merely resemble true speech: “We have taken a stand and we will stick to it. Nothing can prevent us from reaching the goal we have set. But we will of course meet any fair-minded proposition half way.”
In modern states, where the people are being continually harangued under pretense of having their pulse fell, this prevailing windiness, long or short, is a real evil. What a democracy requires from its leaders is not flawless prose, any more than it can require pure reason from the newspaper or the tax collector; but it can and should demand a manly tone springing from a decent use of words — words that arouse if need be, and convince, but which stick close to real intent and which, whenever necessary, buck the current of make-believe emotions. This is what made the verbal powers of Mr. Roosevelt, and at moments like the retreat from Dunkirk, those of Mr. Churchill, irreplaceable aids to our survival as nations. Though politicians, they spoke of high matters in words that told. They rose to statesmanship by resisting the contagion of vulgar posturing.