favourite quotations (on language)

[Verbivore]

... English is primarily a vehicle for the conveyance of ideas; that speaking in a way that conveys meaning effectively is the ultimate objective; that speaking plainly is usually the most effective way of communicating ideas; and that the simple principles laid out in 1906 in The King's English are as good and serviceable guide now as then.

To say this is not to deny the possibility of ornament and invention; but if the thing is the wrong shape, no amount of ornament will fix it.

Burnside, Julian (2006). Wordwatching: Field notes from an amateur philologist. Melbourne: Scribe. p. 289. ISBN 1 921215 10 0

[Verbivore]

EM Forster commenting on sentence structure, and demonstrating by his style the very phenomenon that he’s criticising:

A sentence begins quite simply, then it undulates and expands, parentheses intervene like quickset hedges, the flowers of comparison bloom, and three fields off, like a wounded partridge, crouches the principal verb, making one wonder as one picks it up, poor little thing, whether after all it was worth such a tramp, so many guns and such expensive dogs, and what, after all, is the relation to the main subject, potted so gaily half a page back, and proving finally to have been in the accusative case.

EM Forster, in Abinger Harvest (p. 109) (lifted from his biography, Morgan, by Nicola Beauman).

[Verbivore]

A child's essay on the cow

Why do so many writers prefer pudder to simplicity? Officials are far from being the only offenders. It seems to be a morbid condition contracted in early manhood. Children show no signs of it. Here, for example, is the response of a child of ten to an invitation to write an essay on a bird and a beast:

"The bird that I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.

"I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am going to choose. It is the cow. The cow is a mammal. It has six sides - right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so that t they do not fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realised, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.

"The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not eat much, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full up with grass."

The writer had something to say and said it as clearly as he could, and so has unconsciously achieved style. But why do we write, when we are ten, "so that the mouth can be somewhere" and perhaps when we are thirty "in order to ensure that the mouth may be appropriately positioned environmentally"?

Gowers, Sir Ernest. Complete Plain Words (from page 48, 1st edn, or p. 39, latest edn).

I have read that more times than I can count over 45 years, and I still get a chuckle out of it each time.

[Verbivore]

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a
living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the
circumstances and the time in which it is used.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, (1841-1935)

[Verbivore]

Hello, and a Sontag-semiotic-Paglia-hermeneutic-post-structural-pre-apocalyptic-buzz-word-discourse-multi-syllabled day to you.

From an editorial about the vogue of certain 'in' terms, by Campion Decent (Ed.). Sydney Star Observer. 8/01/1993

[Verbivore]

A lengthy one, but as it's on the subject of language, perhaps I'll be forgiven (or at least indulged).

[...] the usual American response to inequality is to rename it, in the hope that it will then go away. This, as George Orwell pointed out in Politics and the English Language, destroys language without shifting reality one inch [...]

[Here Hughes quotes from Orwell (1946)] “Political language [...] is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

[...] The net gain is that thugs who used to go faggot-bashing now go gay-bashing [...].

Just as language grotesquely inflates in attack, so it timidly shrinks in approbation, seeking words that cannot possibly give any offence, however notional. We do not fail, we underachieve. We are not junkies, but substance abusers; not handicapped, but differently abled. And we are mealy-mouthed unto death: a corpse, the New England Journal of Medicine urged in 1988, should be referred to as a 'nonliving person'. By extension, a fat corpse is a differently sized nonliving person.

If these affected contortions actually made people treat one another with more civility and understanding, there might be an argument for them. But they do no such thing. Seventy years ago, in polite white usage, blacks were called 'coloured people'. Then they became 'negroes'. Then, 'blacks'. Now, 'African-Americans' or 'persons of colour' again. But for millions of white Americans [...] they stayed niggers, and the shift of names has not altered the facts of racism [...].

[...] The notion that you change a situation by finding a newer and nicer word for it emerges from the old American habit of euphemism, circumlocution, and desperate confusion about etiquette, produced by fear that the concrete will give offence. And it is a peculiarly American habit [...].

No shifting of words is going to reduce the amount of bigotry in this or any other society [...]

[...] words are not deeds and mere nomenclature does not change much [...].

Hughes, Robert (1994). Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America. London: Harvill.

[Verbivore]

[referring to an English-resident Pakistani]:

[...] his English was precise and without slang; Shahid could feel the punctuation hanging in the air like netting.

Source: Kureishi, Hanif (1995). The Black Album. London: Faber & Faber. p. 5

[Verbivore]

And another from the same source:

The [train] driver made an announcement over the Tannoy, though what he said, apart from the word 'urgent', was lost. Passengers were so alarmed they spoke to one another.

Source: Kureishi, Hanif (1995). The Black Album. London: Faber & Faber. p. 86

[Verbivore]

On the importance of spelling, this little piece of wisdom from Christopher Robin's friend, Rabbit.

[...] you can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count.

Source: Rabbit, ‘In which Rabbit has a Busy Day, and we learn what Christopher Robin does in the Mornings’, in Milne, AA. The House at Pooh Corner.

[Verbivore]

And one from Eric Arthur Blair:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word when a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Source: Orwell, George (1947). Politics and the English Language.

[Verbivore]

On the topic of verbal diarrhoea:

An avalanche of words now began to pour out of his mouth. It was a torrential downpour not unlike the speedy emptying of genteel English bowels as they tested the native cuisine during the early years of colonizing India. Such was the nature of [...] [the] rant.

Source: Ali, Tariq. Redemption. p. 254

[Verbivore]

On euphemism:

When in calling, plain speaking is out;
When the ladies (God bless 'em) are milling about,
You may wet, make water, or empty the glass;
You can powder your nose, or the "johnny" will pass.
It's a drain for the lily, or man about dog
When everyone's drunk, it's condensing the fog;
But sure as the devil, that word with a hiss
It's only in Shakespeare that characters ****.

Source: Nash, Ogden. Ode to the Four-Letter Words .

[Verbivore]

On his writing style – Sir Walter Scott:

But without further tyranny over my readers, or display of the extent of my own reading, I shall content myself with borrowing a single incident from the memorable hunting at Lude, commemorated in the ingenious Mr. Gunn's essay on the Caledonian Harp, and so proceed in my story with all the brevity that my natural style of composition, partaking of what scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus, will permit me.

Sir Walter Scott (1814), Waverley.

[Verbivore]

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a
living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the
circumstances and the time in which it is used.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., jurist (1841-1935)

[Verbivore]

On appropriate language and the judgments associated with it or its lack:

[...] all language-using situations present us with constraints which we must be aware of and must obey if our contribution is to be judged acceptable. [...] 'Anything goes' is never an option - or, at least, if people do decide to speak or write without paying any attention to the sociolinguistic expectations and mores of their interlocutors, and of the community as a whole, they must expect to be judged accordingly.

(Footnote: Allowances can sometimes be made - as with some kinds of psychiatric disturbance and linguistic pathology, or the utterances of very young children.)

From David Crystal's 2nd edition of Language and the Internet - ISBN-13: 978-0-521-86859-4, pp 7-8.