criticize a story by one of our most successful writers of fiction. In the space of about ten magazine pages this man had one of his characters "gesture" no less than five times. I I pointed out to him that the word gesture was what my old schoolteacher used to call a crutch word. It revealed the pathetic fact that the writer had not first created in his mind a living character, but only a Robot, manufactured from the assembled parts of a vocabulary which had become vulgarized. Most writers have their own familiar words, and it is not a curse on them if they have; but no really wise writer who hopes to grow will use expressions borrowed from others. I suppose that ten or twelve years ago one story in every four or five had a young gentleman in it who "flicked the ash from his cigarette." Now, thanks to the woman who is addicted to smoking, we have an even more frequent variant, a female character who flicks the ash from her ciga

rette.

As for favorite words, Mr. Mencken himself delights in "peasantry" as applied to the American moron, and as a relief falls back on "yokel." I think it was H. G. Wells who first originated the inverted verb as a beginning word to a sentence, which was followed in the motion-pictures by such an avalanche of came-thedawns.

A number of British correspondents have amused themselves by making lists of favorite words of prominent authors. Wordsworth's favorite was solitary. Gibbon had a fondness for elegant, salutary, artful; and Mr. Chesterton is accused of important and uproarious. Dean

Inge of St. Paul's not so long ago referred to this generation as spoon-fed, and this word is now creeping into use as a medium for ironical observation. Some years ago an American writer picked up meticulous, and thereafter it became the fashion. Since then scarcely a week has gone by in which this word has not been used by some one of us. As Sir Henry Hadow has pointed out, the expression "meticulous accuracy" is used as if the adjective had something to do with exact measuring, whereas it is in this respect meaningless. It comes from a Latin word meaning timorous or timid. Similarly our fiction-writers have for long delighted in intrigue, their characters becoming intrigued so persistently as to make us feel like throwing the book into the first filling-station we

come to.

22

Mr. Adolph Ochs, owner of the "New York Times," in a speech before the teachers of journalism and the Association of American Schools and Departments of Journalism, said:

"Although we are very much interested in schools of journalism, we do not yet believe that the young men who come out of these schools are quite fit to come into our office and tell us how to run it. We like to know, however, that when they do come, they bring with them the ability to write good English."

That is true, yet on the same morning this speech was delivered, in a single editorial in the "New York Times," occurs irked (the Democrats in Congress are feeling irked), “let it be said," "showed a welcome access," "along the lines," "the strate

gic time," "it may be noted," and other literary "tags."

The word outstanding is now a great favorite. Mr. Edwin Markham refers to "one of the outstanding books of the season."

In defense of clichés, it is only fair to quote from Havelock Ellis in "The Dance of Life." After defining them, "We mean thereby the use of old stereotyped phrases-Goethe called them 'stamped' or gestempelt, to save the trouble of making a new living phrase to suit our meaning," he goes on:

"Yet the warning against clichés is vain. The good writer, by the very fact that he is alive and craves speech that is vivid, as clichés never are, instinctively avoids their excessive use, while the nervous and bad writer, in his tremulous anxiety to avoid these tabooed clichés, falls into the most deplorable habits, like the late Mr. Robert Ross, who at one time was so anxious to avoid clichés that he acquired the habit of using them in an inverted form and wrote a prose that made one feel like walking on sharp flints. . . . As a matter of fact it is impossible to avoid the use of clichés and counters in speech, and if it were possible the results would be in the highest degree tedious and painful."

I differ. The evidence is against Havelock Ellis. One may read any of the great English writers, Donne, Newman, Macaulay, Balfour, and while there is much that is dreary, their sentences do not show the hasty construction from which clichés are born.

This recalls the unfortunate case of Quiller-Couch, so often referred to by the purists, who wrote a book "On the Art of Writing" in which one

chapter entitled "On Jargon" wasto the delight of his critics-itself full of jargon. It was in this chapter that he used the phrase "in our midst," which Charles A. Dana, the learned editor of the old "New York Sun," held up to such bitter scorn years ago. And to cap the climax, as Quiller-Couch might have put it, he concludes his "Jargon" with this telling phrase: "For the style is the man, and where a man's treasure is there his heart, and his brain, and his writing, will be also." The italics are mine.

23

If we cannot depend on the philologist, the grammarian, the schoolman, or the professional highbrow to solve for us the problem of purer speech, what are we to do?

Mr. Bernard Shaw has said that if there were no churches a right religion would spring up spontaneously from the combined needs of mankind. Similarly, if grammar were abolished, I am inclined to think we should be in better case. We should then begin to study our basic words on their own account; we should treat them with the respect due to their ancient lineage.

Indeed the improvements we hope for in our spoken and written word will not come from venerable and exclusive gentlemen in frock-coats who gather in select companies and discourse on diction, but they will come from two sources: from the main body of the people on the one hand, and from the small body of creative writers on the other hand.

How little do we understand that the universal tendency to imitate is what determines so largely the fashions of this world, not only in actions

but in our thoughts! Sarah Bernhardt wore elbow-gloves to conceal her skinny arms, and elbow-gloves became the style. During the war the soft hat came in and the silk hat went out; then the word high-hatted was used to show the contempt that some people express for their fellows. The soft hat was further influenced by the motion-picture actor, W. S. Hart, whose hat was straightbrimmed, so that straight brims became not the style, but style as far as Mr. Hart was able to influence his period. The Prince of Wales wears his hat on the side of his head and is imitated by an army of young men. His bowler, circling the globe, leaves its progeny behind. Mr. George Harvey, years ago, wore the first tortoise-shell spectacles, and in a few years tortoise-shell Americans became an object of derision for Punch, the whole process resulting in a Harold Lloyd. Thus, as we say, it is to laugh! A generation ago Charles Dana Gibson created the Gibson girl, and every American female, no matter how lowly, tried to look like one. And now is it too much to say that every American girl who womanizes (why not womanize?) an office and delights us with her "colorful" (another fashionable word) personality, tries her "darnedest" to look a composite picture of Mae Murray, Gloria Swanson, Norma Talmadge, and Pola Negri, with, say, a dash of the Gishes.

It is a mistake, therefore, to assume that words spring full-blown from the soil; that is to say, from the mass of people. We shall find on examination that even one dialect itself is not a faithful copy of the speech of the people, but has been

created by the mind of the writer, allowing of course for an original substance. Thus, when I asked Mr. Ring Lardner what his technic is, he replied that he listened. But scrutiny of the work of this remarkable writer will show that it rises far above the common speech, in the same way that Aristophanes and Shakspere created, from the body of material before them, the new forms, and gave them permanence as forms of true art. Professor Krapp shows that, although James Russell Lowell made seven rules for compounding Yankee dialect, in actual practice he did not keep to them, and Professor Krapp makes an analysis of Lowell's poem "The Courtin'" for this purpose. He adds:

"Further analysis of Lowell's dialect writing and of those others who have written in New England dialect will confirm this conclusion. . . . In this poem for example, the New England feeling is given more by rustic simplicity of the content of the poem than by the language of it, and the same observation could be made of a surprisingly large part of American dialect literature. Lowell's dialect in a story of the California gold fields would pass as Western dialect, and would seem not widely out of place on a cotton plantation in the South."

What happens is quite clear. A man who has the necessary gift for writing seizes on the raw material of life as he comes into contact with it, and out of this raw material fashions his production, makes it his own. His success may stimulate a host of writers to go and do likewise, and thus a new school, or cult, is started. The history of American dialect, and

this made them inventive and independent and if we must say so— often crude and over-vulgar. Thus we have to-day innumerable phrases and terms which can but jar upon an ear cultivated even to a moderate degree. We are willing to make things snappy, but not too snappy. We are willing to call our sons and daughters by their right names, but not to call them "brother" and "sister" and "Junior" and by the more generic neologism of "kiddies." We have no particular objection to "cafeteria” (from the Spanish word for coffeeshop), but we object violently to "groceteria" and "drugateria," and even more to "pantorium," which, in the vernacular of the day, is ostensibly a parking place for pants. We object to "low down," to "getting one's goat," and-to move up a step into the language of the more ambitious moron-to "citizenize" and to "funeralize."

And yet these vulgarisms and many more which I refrain from inflicting on my tolerant readers are merely fringes on a very extraordinary national gift which the London "Spectator" refers to thus: "There is not, we suppose, a thinking man who speaks English who has not at some time felt his knowledge of the world and human nature increased as well as his sense of the ridiculous aroused and excited, by an 'Americanism.""

This is, however, a rather striking exception to the English run of criticism of our Americanisms. Dr. Robert Bridges, poet laureate, in referring to their comforting conviction that the English people are the "inheritors of what may claim to be the finest living literature in the world," goes on to speak of the menace which

confronts "our countrymen scattered abroad" and then refers to the fact that this "menace" is "most evident in the United States."

Messrs. H. G. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, authors of "The King's English," and that more recent and more delightfully stimulating work, "Modern English Usage," also warn their readers against Americanisms and take Kipling to task for indulging in them. Apropos of this, is it not true that Walter Pater refused to read Kipling in order that he might not be corrupted?

22

To those who have been kind enough to read what I have written, it is now, I hope, plain that the difficulty in keeping the American language and speech pure does not lie with the mass of people but with the small body of educated men and women who preside over our doubtful destiny: first, the experts, who are trying to reduce human nature to a system of grammatical imbecilities; and, second, the group of creative writers at the top of the heap, who do not care how slovenly they write so long as they are well paid. Much also might be said about the lamentable decline in the spoken word, a decline which dramatists attribute to the effect of the motion-pictures.

Among educated people in general, it must also be clear that, as valuable and necessary as the groundwork of philologists is, our progress will always be measured very largely by the increased attention given to the study of words by men and women who are actually creating our literature. And this applies to every one among our journalists and authors. When we see the men in charge of our