Chapter 12
An Englishman, without employment and without financial reserves, was walking the streets of Philadelphia seeking a position. He entered the office of Mr. Paul Gibbons, a well-known business man of that city, and asked for an interview. Mr. Gibbons looked at the stranger distrustfully. His appearance was emphatically against him. His clothes were shabby and threadbare, and over all of him were written large the unmistakable signs of financial distress. Half out of curiosity, half out of pity, Mr. Gibbons granted the interview. At first, he had intended to listen for only a moment, but the moments grew into minutes, and the minutes mounted into an hour; and the conversation still continued. It ended by Mr. Gibbons telephoning to Mr. Roland Taylor, the Philadelphia manager for Dillon, Read and Company; and Mr. Taylor, one of the leading financiers of that city, invited this stranger to lunch and secured for him a desirable position. How was this man, with the air and outward appearance of failure, able to effect such a prized connection within so short a time?
The secret can be divulged in a single phrase: his command of the English language. He was, in reality, an Oxford man who had come to this country on a business mission which had ended in disaster, leaving him stranded, without funds and without friends. But he spoke his mother tongue with such precision and beauty that his listeners soon forgot his rusty shoes, his frayed coat, his unshaven face. His diction became an immediate passport into the best business circles.
This man’s story is somewhat extraordinary, but it illustrates a broad and fundamental truth, namely, that we are judged each day by our speech. Our words reveal our refinements; they tell the discerning listener of the company we have kept; they are the hallmarks of education and culture.
We have only four contacts with the world, you and I. We are evaluated and classified by four things: by what we do, by how we look, by what we say, and by how we say it. Yet many a person blunders through a long lifetime, after he leaves school, without any conscious effort to enrich his stock of words, to master their shades of meaning, to speak with precision and distinction. He comes habitually to use the overworked and exhausted phrases of the office and street. Small wonder that his talk lacks distinction and individuality. Small wonder that he often violates the accepted traditions of pronunciation, and that he some times transgresses the very canons of English grammar itself. I have heard even college graduates say “ain’t,” and “he don’t,” and “between you and I.” And if people with academic degrees gracing their names commit such errors, what can we expect of those whose education has been cut short by the pressure of economic necessity?
Years ago, I stood one afternoon daydreaming in the Coliseum at Rome. A stranger approached me, an English colonial. He introduced himself, and began talking of his experiences in the Eternal City. He had not spoken three minutes until he had said ‘’you was,” and “I done.” That morning, when he arose, he had polished his shoes and put on spotless linen in order to maintain his own self-respect and to win the respect of those with whom he came in contact; but he had made no attempt whatever to polish his phrases and to speak spotless sentences. He would have been ashamed, for example, of not raising his hat to a woman when he spoke; but he was not ashamed—no, he was not even conscious—of violating the usages of gram mar, of offending the ears of discriminating auditors. By his own words, he stood revealed and placed and classified. His woeful use of the English language proclaimed to the world continually and unmistakably that he was not a person of culture.
Dr. Charles W. Eliot, after he had been president of Harvard for a third of a century, declared: “l recognize but one mental acquisition as a necessary part of the education of a lady or gentleman, namely, an accurate and refined use of the mother tongue.” This is a significant pronouncement. Ponder over it.
But how, you ask, are we to become intimate with words, to speak them with beauty and accuracy? Fortunately, there is no mystery about the means to be employed, no legerdemain. The method is an open secret. Lincoln used it with amazing success. No other American ever wove words into such comely patterns, or produced with prose such matchless music: “with malice towards none, with charity for all.” Was Lincoln, whose father was a shiftless, illiterate carpenter and whose mother was a woman of no extraordinary attainments—was he endowed by nature with this gift for words? There is no evidence to support such an assumption. When he was elected to Congress, he described his education in the official records at Washington, with one adjective: “defective.” He had at tended school less than twelve months in his entire life. And who had been his mentors? Zachariah Birney and Caleb Hazel in the forests of Kentucky, Azel Dorsey and Andrew Crawford along Pigeon Creek in Indiana—itinerant pedagogues, all of them, drifting from one pioneer settlement to another, eking out an existence wherever a few scholars could be found who were willing to exchange hams and corn and wheat for the three R’s. Lincoln had meager assistance, little of uplift or inspiration from them, and little, too, from his daily environment.
The farmers and merchants, the lawyers and litigants with whom he associated in the Eighth Judicial District of Illinois, possessed no magic with words. But Lincoln did not—and this is the significant fact to remember—Lincoln did not squander all his time with his mental equals and inferiors. He made boon companions out of the elite minds, the singers, the poets of the ages. He could repeat from memory whole pages of Burns and Byron and Browning. He wrote a lecture on Burns. He had one copy of Byron’s poems for his office and another for his horne. The office copy had been used so much that it fell open, whenever it was lifted, to Don Juan. Even when he was in the White House and the tragic burdens of the Civil War were sapping his strength and etching deep furrows in his face, he often found time to take a copy of Hood’s poems to bed. Some times he awoke in the middle of the night and, opening the book, he chanced upon verses that especially stirred or pleased. Getting up, clad only in his nightshirt and slippers, he stole through the halls until he found his secretary and read to him poem after poem. In the White House, he found time to repeat long, memorized passages from Shakespeare, to criticize the actor’s reading of them, to give his own individual interpretation. “I have gone over some of Shakespeare’s plays,” he wrote Hackett, the actor, “perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Lear, Richard III, Henry VIII, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful!”
Lincoln was devoted to verse. Not only did he memorize and repeat it, both in private and public, but he even essayed to write it. He read one of his long poems at his sister’s wedding. Later, in middle life, he filled a notebook with his original compositions, but he was so shy about these creations that he never permitted even his closest friends to read them.
“This self-educated man,” writes Robinson in his book, Lincoln as a Man of Letters, “clothed his mind with the materials of genuine culture. Can it genius or talent, the process of his attainment was that described by Professor Emerton in speaking of the education of Erasmus: ‘He was no longer at school, but was simply educating himself by the only pedagogical method which ever yet produced any results anywhere, namely by the method of his own tireless energy in continuous study and practice.’
This awkward prioneer, who used to shuck com and butcher hogs for 31 cents a day on the Pigeon Creek farms of Indiana, delivered, at Gettysburg, one of the most beautiful addresses ever spoken by mortal man. One hundred and seventy thousand men fought there. Seven thousand were killed. Yet Charles Sumner said, shortly after Lincoln’s death, that Lincoln’s address would live when the memory of the battle was lost, and that the battle would one day be remembered largely because of the speech. Who will doubt the correctness of this prophecy?
Edward Everett spoke for two hours at Gettysburg; all that he said has long since been forgotten. Lincoln spoke for less than two minutes: a photographer attempted to take his picture while delivering the speech, but Lincoln had finished before the primitive camera could be set up and focused.
Lincoln’s address has been cast in imperishable bronze and placed in a library at Oxford as an example of what can be done with the English language. It ought to be memorized by every student of public speaking.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
It is commonly supposed that Lincoln originated the immortal phrase which closed this address; but did he? Herndon, his law partner, had given Lincoln, several years previously, a copy of Theodore Parker’s addresses. Lincoln read and underscored in this book the words “Democracy is direct self-government, over all the people, by all the people, and for all the people.” Theodore Parker may have borrowed his phraseology from Webster who had said, four years earlier, in his famous reply to Hayne: “The people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.” Webster may have borrowed his phraseology from President James Monroe who had given voice to the same idea a third of a century earlier. And to whom was James Monroe indebted? Five hundred years before Monroe was born, Wyclif had said, in the preface to the translation of the Scriptures, that “this Bible is for the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” And long before Wyclif lived, more than 400 years before the birth of Christ, Cleon, in an address to the men of Athens, spoke of a ruler “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” And from what ancient source Cleon drew his inspiration, is a matter lost in the fog and night of antiquity.
How little there is that is new! How much even the great speakers owe to their reading and to their association with books!
Books! There is the secret! He who would enrich and enlarge his stock of words must soak and tan his mind constantly in the vats of literature. “The only lamentation that I always feel in the presence of a library,” said John Bright, “is that life is too short and I have no hope of a full enjoyment of the ample repast spread before me.” Bright left school at fifteen, and went to work in a cotton mill, and he never had the chance of schooling again. Yet he became one of the most brilliant speakers of the generation, famous for his superb command of the English language. He read and studied and copied in notebooks and committed to memory long passages from the poetry of Byron and Milton, and Wordsworth and Whittier, and Shakespeare and Shelley. He went through “Paradise Lost” each year to enrich his stock of words.
Charles James Fox read Shakespeare aloud to improve his style. Gladstone called his study a “Temple of Peace,” and in it he kept 15,000 books. He was helped most, he confessed, by reading the works of St. Augustine, Bishop Butler, Dante, Aristotle, and Homer. The Iliad and the Odyssey enthralled him. He wrote six books on Homeric poetry and Homeric times.
The younger Pitt’s practice was to look over a page or two of Greek or Latin and then to translate the passage into his own language. He did this daily for ten years, and “he acquired an almost unrivalied power of putting his thoughts, without premeditation, into words well selected and well arranged.”
Demosthenes copied Thucydides’ history eight times in his own handwriting in order that he might acquire the majestic and impressive phraseology of that famous historian. The result? Two thousand years later, in order to improve his style, Woodrow Wilson studied the works of Demosthenes. Mr. Asquith found his best training in reading the works of Bishop Berkeley.
Tennyson studied the Bible daily. Tolstoy read and reread the Gospels until he knew long passages by memory. Ruskin’s mother forced him by steady, daily toil to memorize long chapters of the Bible and to read the entire Book through aloud each year, “every syllable, hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse.” To that discipline and study Ruskin attributed his taste and style in literature.
R. L. S. are said to be the best loved initials in the English language. Robert Louis Stevenson was essentially a writer’s writer. How did he develop the charming style that made him famous? Fortunately, he has told us the story himself.
Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful, and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and coordination of parts.
I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne.
That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was the way Keats learned, and there never was a finer temperament for literature than Keats’.
It is the great point of these imitations that there still shines beyond the student’s reach, his inimitable model. Let him try as he please, he is still sure of failure; and it is an old and very true saying that failure is the only highroad to success.
Enough of names and specific stories. The secret is out. Lincoln wrote it to a young man eager to become a successful lawyer: “It is only to get the books and to read and study them carefully. Work, work, work is the main thing.”
What books? Begin with Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day. This book will be as stimulating as a cold bath. It will tell you a lot about that most interesting of all subjects—yourself. It will reveal to you how much time you are wasting each day, how to stop the wastage, and how to utilize what you salvage. The entire book has only 103 pages. You can get through it easily in a week. Tear out twenty pages each morning, put them in your hip pocket. Then offer up upon the altar of the morning newspaper only ten minutes instead of the customary twenty or thirty minutes.
“I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “and I find myself much the happier.” Don’t you believe that you, by following Jefferson’s example at least to the extent of cutting your newspaper reading in half, would find yourself happier and wiser as the weeks go by? Aren’t you, at any rate, willing to try it for a month, and to devote the time you have thus salvaged to the more enduring value of a good book? Why not read the pages you are to carry with you while waiting for elevators, for buses, for food, for appointments?
After you have read those twenty pages, replace them in the book, tear out another twenty. When you have consumed them all, put a rubber band around the covers to hold the loose pages in place. Isn’t it better far to have a book butchered and mutilated in that fashion, with its message in your head, than to have it reposing unbruised and unread upon the shelves of your library?
After you have finished How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day, you may be interested in another book by the same author. Try The Human Machine. This book will enable you to handle people more tactfully. It will develop your poise and self-possession. These books are recommended here not only for what they say, but for the way they say “it, for the enriching and refining effect they are sure to have upon your vocabulary.
Some other books that will be helpful are suggested: The Octopus and The Pit, by Frank Norris, are two of the best American novels ever written. The first deals with turmoils and human tragedies occurring in the wheat fields of California; the second portrays the battles of the bears and bulls, on the Chicago Board of Trade. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, is one of the most beautiful tales ever written. A Man’s Value to Society, by Newell Dwight Hillis and Professor William James’ Talks to Teachers are two books well worth reading. Ariel, A Life of Shelley, by Andre Maurois, Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey should also be on your list.
Make Ralph Waldo Emerson your daily companion. Command him to give you first his famous essay on “Self-Reliance.” Let him whisper into your ear marching sentences like these:
Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for always the inmost becomes the outmost,—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton, is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men said but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humoured inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
But we have really left the best authors to the last. What are they? When Sir Henry Irving was asked to furnish a list of what he regarded as the hundred best books, he replied: “Before a hundred books, commend me to the study of two—the Bible and Shakespeare.” Sir Henry was right. Drink from these two great fountain sources of English literature. Drink long and often. Toss your evening newspaper aside and say, “Shakespeare, come here and talk to me tonight of Romeo and his Juliet, of Macbeth and his ambition.”
If you do these things, what will be your reward? Gradually, unconsciously but inevitably, your diction will begin to take on added beauty and refinement. Gradually, you will begin to reflect somewhat the glory and beauty and majesty of your companions. “Tell me what you read,” observed Goethe, “and I will tell you what you are.”
This reading program that I have suggested will require little but will power, little but a more careful husbanding of time… You can purchase pocket copies of Emerson’s essays and Shakespeare’s plays for fifty cents each.
The Secret of Mark Twain’s Way with Words
How did Mark Twain develop his delightful facility with words? As a young man, he traveled all the way from Missouri to Nevada by the ponderously slow and really painful stage coach. Food—and sometimes even water—had to be carried for both passengers and horses. Extra weight might have meant the difference between safety and disaster; baggage was charged for by the ounce; and yet Mark Twain carried with him a Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary over mountain passes, across scorched deserts, and through a land infested with bandits and Indians. He wanted to make himself master of words, and with his characteristic courage and common sense, he set about doing the things necessary to bring that mastery about.
Both Pitt and Lord Chatham studied the dictionary twice, every page, every word of it. Browning pored over it daily, finding in it entertainment as well as instruction. Lincoln “would sit in the twilight,” records his biographers, Nicolay and Hay, “and read a dictionary as long as he could see.” These are not exceptional instances. Every writer and speaker of distinction has done the same.
Woodrow Wilson was superbly skillful with the English language. Some of his writings—parts of his Declaration of War against Germany—will undoubtedly take a place in literature. Here is his own story of how he learned to marshal words:
My father never allowed any member of his household to use an incorrect expression. Any slip on the part of one of the children was at once corrected; any unfamiliar word was immediately explained; each of us was encouraged to find a use for it in our conversation so as to fix it in our memories.
A New York speaker who is often complimented upon the firm texture of his sentences and the simple beauty of his language, during the course of a conversation recently, lifted the embargo on the secret of his power to choose true and incisive words. Each time he discovers an unfamiliar word in conversation or reading matter, he notes it in his memorandum book. Then, just prior to retiring at night, he consults his dictionary and makes the word his own. If he has gathered no material in this fashion during the day, he studies a page or two of Fernald’s Synonyms, Antonyms and Prepositions, noting the exact meaning of the words which he would ordinarily interchange as perfect synonyms. A new word a day—that is his motto. This means in the course of a year three hundred and sixty–five additional tools for expression. These new words are stored away in a small pocket notebook, and their meanings reviewed at odd moments during the day. He has found that a word becomes a permanent acquisition to his vocabulary when he has used it three times.
Romantic Stories Behind the Words You Use
Use a dictionary not only to ascertain the meaning of the word, but also to find its derivation. Its history, its origin is usually set down in brackets after the definition. Do not imagine for a moment that the words you speak each day are only dull, listless sounds. They are reeking with color; they are alive with romance. You cannot, for example, say so prosaic a thing as “Telephone the grocer for sugar,” without using words that we have borrowed from many different languages and civilizations. Telephone is made from two Greek words, tele, meaning far, and phone, meaning sound. Grocer comes from an old French word, grossier, and the French came from the Latin, grossarius; it literally means one who sells by the wholesale or gross. We got our word sugar from the French; the French borrowed it from the Spanish; the Spanish lifted it from the Arabic; the Arabic took it from the Persian; and the Persian word shaker was derived from the Sanskrit carkara, meaning candy.
You may work for or own a company. Company is derived from an old French word meaning companion; and companion is literally com, with, and panis, bread. Your companion is one with whom you have bread. A company is really an association of people who are trying to make their bread together. Your salary literally means your salt money. The Roman soldiers drew a certain allowance for salt, and one day some wag spoke of his entire income as his solarium, and created a bit of slang which has long since become respectable English. You are holding in your hand a book. It literally means beech, for a long time ago the Anglo-Saxons scratched their words on beech trees and on tablets of beech wood. The dollar that you have in your pocket literally means valley. Dollars were first coined in St. Joachim’s Thaler or dale or valley in the sixteenth century.
The words janitor and January have both come down from the name of an Etruscan blacksmith who lived in Rome and made a specialty of Jocks and bolts for doors. When he died, he was deified as a pagan god, and was represented as having two faces, so that he could look both ways at the same time, and was associated with the opening and closing of doors. So the month that stood at the close of one year and the opening of another was called January, or the month of Janus. So when we talk of January or a janitor, a keeper of doors, we are honoring the name of a blackmsith who lived a thousand years before the birth of Christ and who had a wife by the name of Jane.
The seventh month, July, was named after Julius Cresar; so the Emperor Augustus, not to be outdone, called the next month August. But the eighth month had only thirty days at that time, and Augustus did not propose to have the month named after him any shorter than a month named after Julius; so he took one day away from February and added it to August, and the marks of this vainglorious theft are evident on the calendar hanging in your home today. Truly, you will find the history of words fascinating.
Try looking up in a large dictionary the derivation of these words: atlas, boycott, cereal, colossal, concord, curfew, education, finance, lunatic, panic, palace, pecuniary, sandwich, tantalize. Get the stories behind them. It will make them doubly colorful, doubly interesting. You will use them, then, with added zest and pleasure.
Rewriting One Sentence a Hundred and Four Times
Strive to say precisely what you mean, to express the most delicate nuances of thought. That is not always easy—not even for experienced writers. Fanny Hurst told me that she sometimes rewrote her sentences from fifty to a hundred times. Only a few days prior to the conversation she said she had rewritten one sentence one hundred and four times by actual count. Mabel Herbert Umer confided to me that she sometimes spent an entire afternoon eliminating only one or two sentences from a short story that was to be syndicated through the newspapers.
Gouverneur Morris bas told bow Richard Harding Davis labored incessantly for just the right word:
Every phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could think of, the fittest in his relentless judgment to survive. Phrases, paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written over and over again. He worked upon a principle of elimination. If he wished to describe an automobile turning in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description from which there was omitted no detail, which the most observant pair of eyes in Christendom has ever noted with reference to just such a turning. Thereupon he would begin a profess of omitting one by one those details which he had been at such pains to recall; and after each omission he would ask himself, “Does the picture remain?” If it did not he restored the detail which he had just omitted, and experimented with the sacrifice of some other, and so on, and so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for the reader one of those swiftly flashed ice-clear pictures (complete in every detail) with which his tales and romances are so delightfully and continuously adorned.
Most of us have neither time nor disposition to search so diligently for words. These instances are cited to show you the importance successful writers attach to proper diction and expression, in the hope that it may encourage students to take an increased interest in the use of English. It is, of course, not practical for a speaker to hesitate in a sentence and uh-uh about, hunting for the word which will exactly express the shade of meaning be desires to convey, but he should practice preciseness of expression in his daily intercourse until it comes unconsciously. He should, but does he? He does not.
Milton is reported to have employed eight thousand words, and Shakespeare fifteen thousand. A Standard Dictionary contains fifty thousand less than half a million; but the average man, according to popular estimates, gets along with approximately two thousand. He has some verbs, enough connectives to stick them together, a handful of nouns, and a few overworked adjectives. He is too lazy, mentally, or too absorbed in business, to train for precision and exactness. The result? Let me give you an illustration. I once spent a few unforgettable days on the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. In the course of an afternoon, I heard a lady apply the same adjective to a Chow dog, an orchestral selection, a man’s disposition, and the Grand Canyon itself. They were all “beautiful.”
What should she have said? Here are the synonyms that Roget lists for beautiful. Which adjectives do you think she should have employed?
Adjective: beautiful, beauteous, handsome, pretty, lovely, graceful, elegant, exquisite, delicate, dainty.
Comely, fair, goodly, bonny, good-looking, well favoured, well-formed, well-proportioned, shapely, symmetrical, harmonious.
bright, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, rosy, ruddy, blooming, in full bloom.
trim, trig, tidy, neat, spruce, smart, jaunty, dapper.
brilliant, shining, sparkling, radiant, splendid, resplendent, dazzling, glowing, glossy, sleek, rich, gorgeous, superb, magnificent, grand, fine.
artistic, resthetic, picturesque, pictorial, enchanting, attractive, becoming, ornamental.
perfect, unspotted, spotless, immaculate, undeformed, undefaced.
passable, presentable, tolerable, not amiss.
The synonyms just quoted have been taken from Roget’s Treasury of Words. It is an abridged edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. What a help this book is. Personally, I never write without having it at my elbow. I find occasion to use it ten times as often as I use the dictionary.
What years of toil Rogct consecrated to its making; yet it will come and sit on your desk and serve you a lifetime for the price of an inexpensive necktie. It is not a book to be stored away on a library shelf. It is a tool to be used constantly. Use it when writing out and polishing the diction of your talks. Use it in dictating your letters and your committee reports. Use it daily, and it will double and treble your power with words.
Shun Worn-Out Phrases
Strive not only to be exact, but to be fresh and original. Have the courage to say the thing as you see it, for “the God of things as they are.” For example, shortly after the Flood, some original mind first used the comparison, “cool as a cucumber.” It was extraordinarily good then because it was extraordinarily fresh. Even as late as Belshazzar’s famous feast, it may still have retained enough of its pristine vigor to warrant its use in an after-dinner speech. But what man who prides himself on his originality would be guilty of repeating it at this somewhat late date?
Here are a dozen similes to express coldness. Aren’t they just as effective as the hackneyed “cucumber” comparison, and far fresher and more acceptable?
Cold as a frog.
Cold as a hot-water bag in the morning.
Cold as a ramrod.
Cold as a tomb.
Cold as Greenland’s icy mountains.
Cold as clay.—Coleride.
Cold as a turtle.—Richard Cumberland.
Cold as the drifting snow.—Allan Cunningham.
Cold as salt.—James Hunekcr.
Cold as an eartbworm.—Mauricc Maeterlinck.
Cold as dawn.
Cold as rain in autumn.
While the mood is upon you, think now of similes of your own to convey the idea of coldness. Have the courage to be distinctive. Write them here:
Cold as ………………..
Cold as ………………..
Cold as ………………..
Cold as ………………..
Cold as ………………..
I once asked Kathleen Norris how style could be developed. “By reading classics of prose and poetry,” she replied, “and by critically eliminating stock phrases and hackneyed expressions from your work.”
A magazine editor once told me that when he found two or three hackneyed expressions in a story submitted for publication, he returned it to the author without wasting time reading it; for, he added, one who has no originality of expression will exhibit little originality of thought.
Summary
- We have only four contacts with people. We are evaluated and classified by four things: by what we do, by how we look, by what we say, and how we say it. How often we are judged by the language we use. Charles W. Eliot, after he had been president of Harvard for a third of a century, declared: “I recognize but one mental acquisition as a necessary part of the education of a lady or gentleman, namely, an accurate and refined use of the mother tongue.”
- Your diction will be very largely a reflection of the company you keep. So follow Lincoln’s example and keep company with the masters of literature. Spend your evenings, as he often did, with Shakespeare and the other great poets and masters of prose. Do that and unconsciously, inevitably, your mind will be enriched and your diction will take on something of the glory of your companions.
- “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “and I find myself much the happier.” Why not follow his example? Don’t give up the newspapers completely, but skim through in half the time you now devote to them. Give the time you thus salvage to the reading of some enduring book. Tear out twenty or thirty pages from such a volume, carry them in your pocket, read them at odd moments during the day.
- Read with a dictionary by your side. Look up the unfamiliar word. Try to find a use for it so that you may fix it in your memory.
- Study the derivation of the words you use. Their histories are not dull and dry; often they are replete with romance. For example, the word salary really means salt money. The Roman soldiers were given an allowance for the purchase of salt. Some wag one day created a bit of slang by referring to his wage as his salt money.
- Don’t use shopworn, threadbare words. Be precise, exact, in your meaning. Keep Roget’s Treasury of Words on your desk. Refer to it often. Don’t qualify as “beautiful” everything that is appealing to the eye. You may convey your meaning more precisely and with more freshness and beauty if you employ some synonym of beautiful—such as elegant, exquisite, handsome, dainty, shapely, jaunty, dapper, radiant, dazzling, gorgeous, superb, magnificent, picturesque, etc.
- Don’t use trite comparisons such as “cool as a cucumber.” Strive for freshness. Create similes of your own. Have the courage to be distinctive.
