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5.

opened an American novel the other day and read that the heroine had
come to New York "to glimpse contacts and sense reactions". I immediately
shut that novel. So I hope we will be chary about these spurious
counters - "isms" and "ologies", "inhibitions", "complexes", "repressions";
and say what we have to say in the simple, vivid language
of ordinary life. Unless your object is to avoid the law of libel,
don't say that a man has a complex of misappropriation", but that he is
a thief; don't say that he "dabbles in terminological inexactitudes",
but that he is a liar. Do not, I beseech you, turn the first sentence
of the Scots Shorter Catechism, "Man's chief end is to glorify God"
into "The supreme objective of humanity is to further the realisation
of the Absolute Will," which does not mean so much, if it means anything
at all. The English language has a noble concreteness not to be
paralleled, I think, by any other tongue. It is our business to take
advantage of what the gods have given us. I am inclined to think that
more good writing today is spoilt by sudden lapses into meaningless
philosophical abstractions and loosely used scientific terms than by
any other fault of style.

There is a third danger, which does not depend upon the misuse
of words so much as upon the complete breakdown of structure and
syntax. I should call it the jazz style, which forgets that all good
writing and speaking must have structure and shape, and must obey certain
rules. This is a fault just as much of the highbrows as of the
ordinary man. A great deal of our modern poetry in England rejoices
in having no verbs, and the reader has to puzzle it out as if it were
an acrostic. Surely that is not any kind of poetry! There is a certain
type of modern fiction which is largely a series of interjections,

5.

opened an American novel the other day and read that the heroine had
come to New York "to glimpse contacts and sense reactions". I immediately
shut that novel. So I hope we will be chary about these spurious
counters - "isms" and "ologies", "inhibitions", "complexes", "repressions";
and say what we have to say in the simple, vivid language
of ordinary life. Unless your object is to avoid the law of libel,
don't say that a man has a complex of misappropriation", but that he is
a thief; don't say that he "dabbles in terminological inexactitudes",
but that he is a liar. Do not, I beseech you, turn the first sentence
of the Scots Shorter Catechism, "Man's chief end is to glorify God"
into "The supreme objective of humanity is to further the realisation
of the Absolute Will," which does not mean so much, if it means anything
at all. The English language has a noble concreteness not to be
paralleled, I think, by any other tongue. It is our business to take
advantage of what the gods have given us. I am inclined to think that
more good writing today is spoilt by sudden lapses into meaningless
philosophical abstractions and loosely used scientific terms than by
any other fault of style.

There is a third danger, which does not depend upon the misuse
of words so much as upon the complete breakdown of structure and
syntax. I should call it the jazz style, which forgets that all good
writing and speaking must have structure and shape, and must obey certain
rules. This is a fault just as much of the highbrows as of the
ordinary man. A great deal of our modern poetry in England rejoices
in having no verbs, and the reader has to puzzle it out as if it were
an acrostic. Surely that is not any kind of poetry! There is a certain
type of modern fiction which is largely a series of interjections,