Neverisms

splashin’ around in the canawl, figgeratively speakin’.ARTEMUS WARD

Artemus Ward was a popular nineteenth-century humorist who numbered Abraham Lincoln among his fans. Ward was also believed to have served as an early inspiration for Mark Twain. He was noted for speaking and writing in a phonetic dialect.

Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness,

but come down into the green valleys of silliness.LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

Never commit “the sin of the desert.”ZIG ZIGLAR, in Ziglar on Selling (1993)

“The sin of the desert” is knowing where the water is but not sharing the information.

eighteen

Never Use a Long Word Where a Short One Will Do

The Literary Life

On a chilly November morning in 1867, the fifty-eight- year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. delivered a lecture to students at the Harvard Medical School. Professor Holmes, who had received a medical degree from Harvard three decades earlier, had been on the faculty since 1847, and he served as dean of the school since 1853.

A respected figure in the field of medicine, Holmes was even better known in the general culture for his literary efforts. He first received national attention in 1830 as a twenty-one-year-old Boston lawyer (he would soon abandon his plans for a legal career and decide to become a physician). Outraged at learning that U.S. Navy authorities were planning to decommission and dismantle the USS Constitution, he wrote a poem in protest and sent it to a Boston newspaper. Titled “Old Ironsides,” the poem was soon reprinted in newspapers all over America. Almost overnight, Holmes’s impassioned poetic effort mobilized public sentiment against the navy’s plans, and the ship was ultimately preserved as a historic monument. Today, 180 years after the poem’s publication, the USS Constitution, still affectionately known as “Old Ironsides,” is the world’s oldest commissioned ship still in service. And the historic vessel lives on in large part as a result of the efforts of this one man.

In 1858, while teaching full-time at the medical school, Holmes came out with The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, a collection of essays originally written for The Atlantic Monthly. The book was enthusiastically received by critics, who began describing Holmes as a major American essayist. It was also a great commercial success, selling 10,000 copies in the first three days of publication. A sequel, The Professor at the Breakfast-Table, appeared two years later, and a third volume, The Poet at the Breakfast-Table, followed in 1872.

In his 1867 lecture, Holmes was speaking about medicine, but his experiences as a writer clearly informed his ideas. Near the end of his talk, he urged the students to avoid pretension and to describe things simply and plainly:

I would never use a long word . . .

where a short one would answer the purpose.

I know there are professors in this country who “ligate” arteries.

Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well.

Over the following decades, the notion of using short words instead of long ones became a rule of thumb for writers, but it was turned into a formal rule of writing in April 1946, when Horizon magazine published an essay titled “Politics and the English Language,” by the English writer George Orwell.

At the time, Orwell was moderately well known in England as a journalist and essayist, but he was not even close to achieving the international fame that would come three years later with the publication of his dystopian classic 1984. Even though his satirical novel Animal Farm had been published the previous year in England, it was still unclear how successful the book would be (an American edition was in production, but not yet out).

After the success of 1984, Orwell became an internationally famous writer, and renewed interest was paid to his earlier writings, including the 1946 Horizon essay, a powerful polemic on the abuse of language and the effect of bad writing. In the piece, Orwell argued that sloppy thinking and bad writing not only go together, they mutually reinforce one another:A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The article concluded with six rules for writers, now commonly called “Orwell’s Six Rules of Writing.” Four were expressed neveristically, and one can be traced back to that famous 1867 lecture from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes: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 where 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.

Orwell’s essay has become such an integral part of literary culture that it’s now almost impossible to imagine a professional writer who is not familiar with it. Indeed, the second rule has become so popular that it’s been parodied many times (as in William Safire’s famous spin-off, discussed in the oxymoronic & paradoxical neverisms chapter).

In offering his thoughts about writing mistakes and missteps, Orwell was continuing a longstanding tradition. Rules of composition have been an integral part of literary culture for centuries. As commonly happens with rules, however, they are sometimes taken too far. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was common for teachers and editors to proclaim:

Never end a sentence with a preposition.

This injunction has frustrated many young people learning the craft of writing, and it has infuriated many experienced ones who found their drafts “corrected” by editors slavishly following the rule. When Winston Churchill was reviewing the edited manuscript of one of his books, he discovered that a punctilious editor had reworded one of his sentences so that it did not end in a preposition. There are differing versions of exactly what Churchill scrawled in the margin as a note to the editor, but all are phrased in such a way that it didn’t end in a preposition, including: “This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which I shall not put.”

Happily, that old rule has been relegated to the dustbin of history. William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White described it all quite nicely in their classic writing guide The Elements of Style (1999):Years ago, students were warned not to end a sentence with a preposition; time, of course, has softened that rigid decree. Not only is the preposition acceptable at the end, sometimes it is more effective in that spot than anywhere else.

Another writing rule that no longer governs is