A Summer Sampler on Words and Language

by Vic Jameson

Book Notes

In a book called Communications: The Transfer of Meaning, author Don Fabun writes this:

“In the beginning was the word — And

“Perhaps all stories should begin with the word and. Perhaps they should end with the word and too. It would remind us that no experience ever begins; there was always something that preceded it. What really began, for us, was our awareness of something going on. At the end, the word and … would remind us that no story ever really ends — something more will happen.

“ … There is always more to start with than we can take into account. There is always more to say than we can possibly say. There is always more to end with than we can imagine.” (Communications: The Transfer of Meaning was published by Glencoe Press, a division of The Macmilian Company, under a 1968 copyright by Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corporation.)

ON PLAIN SPEAKING

Paula LaRocque is writing coach at the Dallas Morning News and conducts a writing clinic for Quill magazine. She makes this case for clarity in writing:

“Fine and memorable writing is fine and memorable memorable because of its simplicity — because the writer has taken the time to rewrite and refine. Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg is renowned not for highfalutin rhetoric, but for the natural stateliness and clarity and simplicity.” She cites two examples of the same message in different words. One version is by Richard Mitchell in “Less Than Words Can Say”:

“Consolidated defensive positions and essential pre-planned withdrawal facilities are to be provided in order to facilitate maximum potentialization for the repulsion and or delay of incursive combatants in each of several pre-identified categories of locations deemed suitable to the emplacement and/or debarkation of hostile military contingents.”

Winston Churchill said the same thing like this: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the field and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.” LaRocque adds:

“Fuzzy writing always reflects fuzzy thought. Lack of conversational grace and simplicity is bad because it fails to please. But lack of clarity is worse because it fails to inform.”

A THOUSAND TONGUES

Some selected jewels from Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, published in 1990 by William Morroew and Company, Inc., New York:

“More than 300 million people in the world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. It would be charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed …

“It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000) …

“We do not have the faintest idea whether the first words spoken were uttered 20,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago. What is certain is that mankind did little except procreate and survive for 100,000 generations. (For purposes of comparison, only about eighty generations separate us from Christ). Then suddenly, about 30,000 years ago, there burst forth an enormous creative and cooperative effort which led to the cave paintings at Lascaux, the development of improved lightweight tools, the control of fire, and many other cooperative arrangements. It is unlikely that any of this could have been achieved without a fairly sophisticated system of language.”