New at IWP Books: Don Marquis, Chapters for the Orthodox, 1934. Which Albert Jay Nock thought was a “delightful” book. Two quotes:

If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s theology. Did I ever mention publicly how Hell got started? I don’t think I ever did. It was this way: I thought I’d do something nice for a lot of theologians who had, after all, been doing the best they could, according to their lights; so I gave them an enormous tract of Heaven to do what they pleased with – set it apart for them to inhabit and administer. I didn’t pay any attention to it for a few thousand years, and when I looked at it again, they’d made it into Hell. Yes, that’s how Hell got started.”

The Christian ideas and ideals, if they were really put into practice, instead of being merely talked about, in churches and elsewhere, would burst the world asunder. Cover them up with any sort of talk or clever explication you like, attempt to explain them away if you will, the fact is that if they are really put into effect it means a revolution in every department of human life, an overturning of all our cherished institutions. Do we believe in these ideals enough to follow through with them to the limit, to face all that their sincere practice connotes?

More than 50 books published online, including works by Desmond MacCarthy, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Bernard Berenson, Leo Stein, Willa Cather, & Logan Pearsall Smith. Moreover: Two collections of Horace translations (of Ad Pyrrham and Exegi Monumentum), and several hard-to-find translations of the odes.

From An Exaltation of Larks, or The Venereal Game (1968) by James Lipton.

“Our language, one of our most precious natural resources in the English-speaking countries, is also a dwindling one that deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes. We don’t write letters, we make long-distance calls; we don’t read, we are talked to, in the resolutely twelve-year-old vocabulary of radio and television. Under the banner of Timesaving we are offered only the abbreviated, the abridged, the aborted. Our Noble Eightfold Path consists entirely of shortcuts. And what are we urged to do with the time saved by these means? Skim through the Reader’s Digest at eighteen hundred words a minute, eating a pre-cooked dinner of condensed soup and reconstituted meat and vegetables on a jet going six hundred miles an hour. Refreshed by our leisurely holiday we can then plunge back into the caucus-race with renewed vigor, dashing breathless behind the Dodo toward an ever-retreating finish-line. Before it is too late I would like to propose a language sanctuary, a wild-word refuge, removed and safe from the hostile environment of our TV-tabloid world.

“Perhaps it is already too late. Under the influence of film and television especially (both valuable but intensely pictorial arts) the picture is finally replacing those maligned thousand words. Soon, if all goes badly, we may be reduced to a basic vocabulary of a few hundred smooth, homogenized syllables, and carry tiny movie projectors and bandoliers of miniaturized film cartridges to project our more important thoughts (too precious to entrust to mere words) in the proper pictorial form on the shirtfront of our conversational partner. Eventually we may be able to press a button on our belt and produce an instantaneous, abstract, psychedelic, atonal, aleatory light-show that will penetrate straight to the beholder’s chromosomes, influencing not only him or her, but logophobic generations yet unborn. Wordless, we will build the new Jerusalem!”

Worth subscribing to The New Criterion for these, and many others by Joseph Epstein:

Another Willa Cather at IWP Books: A Lost Lady, 1922.

The winter before, when the Forresters were away, and one dull day dragged after another, he had come upon a copious diversion, an almost inexhaustible resource. The high, narrow bookcase in the back office, between the double doors and the wall, was filled from top to bottom with rows of solemn looking volumes bound in dark cloth, which were kept apart from the law library; an almost complete set of the Bohn classics, which Judge Pommeroy had bought long ago when he was a student at the University of Virginia. He had brought them West with him, not because he read them a great deal, but because, in his day, a gentleman had such books in his library, just as he had claret in his cellar. Among them was a set of Byron in three volumes, and last winter, apropos of a quotation which Niel didn’t recognize, his uncle advised him to read Byron, — all except “Don Juan.” That, the Judge remarked, with a deep smile, he “could save until later.” Niel, of course, began with “Don Juan.” Then he read “Tom Jones” and “Wilhelm Meister” and raced on until he came to Montaigne and a complete translation of Ovid. He hadn’t finished yet with these last, — always went back to them after other experiments. These authors seemed to him to know their business. Even in “Don Juan” there was a little “fooling,” but with these gentlemen none.

There were philosophical works in the collection, but he did no more than open and glance at them. He had no curiosity about what men had thought; but about what they had felt and lived, he had a great deal. If anyone had told him that these were classics and represented the wisdom of the ages, he would doubtless have let them alone. But ever since he had first found them for himself, he had been living a double life, with all its guilty enjoyments. He read the Heroides over and over, and felt that they were the most glowing love stories ever told. He did not think of these books as something invented to beguile the idle hour, but as living creatures, caught in the very behaviour of living, — surprised behind their misleading severity of form and phrase. He was eavesdropping upon the past, being let into the great world that had plunged and glittered and sumptuously sinned long before little Western towns were dreamed of. Those rapt evenings beside the lamp gave him a long perspective, influenced his conception of the people about him, made him know just what he wished his own relations with these people to be.

New Willa Cather at IWP Books: The Professor’s House, 1925. “…long after they had ceased to be pupil and master, he had been able to experience afresh things that had grown dull with use. The boy’s mind had the superabundance of heat which is always present where there is rich germination. To share his thoughts was to see old perspectives transformed by new effects of light.”

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman; The Gift of Doubt by Malcolm Gladwell.

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"Previously, men could be divided simply into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his speciality; but neither is he ignorant, because he is ‘a scientist,’ and ‘knows’ very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line. And such in fact is the behavior of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of -- this is the paradox -- specialists in those matters. By specializing him, civilization has made him hermetic and self-satisfied within his limitations; but this very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his speciality. The result is that even in this case, representing a maximum of qualification in man -- specialization -- and therefore the thing most opposed to the mass-man, the result is that he will behave in almost all spheres of life as does the unqualified, the mass-man." (Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses)

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How Reading Josef Pieper Can Help You Stay Sane

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"...we can always do more for mankind by following the good in a straight line than we can by making concessions to evil. The illusion that it is wise or necessary to suppress our instinctive love of truth comes from an imperfect understanding of what that instinctive love of truth represents, and of what damage happens both to ourselves and to others when we suppress it. The more closely we look at the facts, the more serious does this damage appear. And on the other hand, the more closely we look at the facts, the more trifling, inconsequent, and absurd do all those reasons appear which strive to make us accept, and thereby sanctify and preserve, some portion of the conceded evil in the world." (John Jay Chapman, Practical Agitation)

New at IWP Books: Willa Cather, 1927, Death Comes for the Archbishop. Willa Cather was born on Dec. 7, 1873. It is now Friday morning of Dec. 6 in St. Ives, NSW, Australia.

One Cheer for E. M. Forster by Joseph Epstein

More Crabbe at IWP Books: George Crabbe, The Village (1783) and The Newspaper (1785).

Sing, drooping Muse, the cause of thy decline;
Why reign no more the once-triumphant Nine?
Alas! new charms the wavering many gain,
And rival sheets the reader’s eye detain;
A daily swarm, that banish every Muse,
Come flying forth, and mortals call them news:
For these, unread, the noblest volumes lie;
For these, in sheets unsoil’d, the Muses die;
Unbought, unblest, the virgin copies wait
In vain for fame, and sink, unseen, to fate.

New at IWP Books: George Crabbe, 1781, The Library. “To think of Crabbe is to think of England.” (E. M. Forster)

But what strange art, what magic can dispose
The troubled mind to change its native woes?
Or lead us willing from ourselves, to see
Others more wretched, more undone than we?
This Books can do; — nor this alone; they give
New views to life, and teach us how to live;
They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise,
Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise:
Their aid they yield to all: they never shun
The man of sorrow, nor the wretch undone:
Unlike the hard, the selfish, and the proud,
They fly not sullen from the suppliant crowd;
Nor tell to various people various things,
But show to subjects what they show to kings.

“…telling the truth to ourselves and to the world is a condition of survival, the beginning of revival, and the only moral option.” Fania Oz-Salzberger, We Have to Choose

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“How rotten is the translation of Lang, Leaf & Myers. Surely Pope is better.” E. M. Forster (1903)

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Anonymity: An Enquire by E. M. Forster.

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What William Vallicella Likes About Wittgenstein

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“Unlimited gullibility is required to be able to believe that any social condition can be improved in any other way than slowly, gradually, and involuntarily.” Nicolás Gómez Dávila

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“Our progress is slow; the path leads upward at a very small angle. But let us remember that slowness of growth is what America most needs in all directions. In everything we have grown up too quickly. Today all things among us go crashing forward too quickly. We should not desire sudden changes, even for the better. Sudden changes signify short-lived events. Therefore, if we see steady improvement going forward anywhere, let us rejoice that it goes forward slowly, so that its roots may sink deep, and all nature may accommodate herself to the change. Thus will the good things become permanent. Isaiah says in a text that is too seldom quoted: ‘He that believeth shall not make haste.'” John Jay Chapman, 1915, The Negro Question

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“Tão cedo passa tudo quanto passa!
Morre tão jovem ante os deuses quanto
Morre! Tudo é tão pouco!
Nada se sabe, tudo se imagina.
Circunda-te de rosas, ama, bebe e cala.
O mais é nada.”
Ricardo Reis (Fernando Pessoa)

Books on India at IWP Books:

  • G. Lowes Dickinson, 1914, Appearances: Being Notes of Travel
  • E. M. Forster, 1953, The Hill of Devi
  • Aldous Huxley, 1926, Jesting Pilate

“Another neighbour, a patriarchal old Englishman with a white beard, kept a great stand of bees. I remember his incessant drumming on a tin pan to marshal them when they were swarming, and myself as idly wondering who first discovered that this was the thing to do, and why the bees should fall in with it. It struck me that if the bees were as intelligent as bees are cracked up to be, instead of mobilising themselves for old man Reynolds’s benefit, they would sting him soundly and then fly off about their business. I always think of this when I see a file of soldiers, wondering why the sound of a drum does not incite them to shoot their officers, throw away their rifles, go home, and go to work. Why, instead of producing this effect which seems natural and reasonable, does it produce one which seems exactly the opposite? In the course of time I found that Virgil had remarked the fact about bees, and that in his parable called The Drum Count Tolstoy had remarked the fact about the human animal. Neither, however, had accounted for the fact. Virgil had not tried to account for it, and Count Tolstoy’s attempt was scattering and unsatisfactory.” (Albert Jay Nock, 1943, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man)

From Albert Jay Nock, “The Triumph of the Gadget,” The American Mercury, July, 1939

During the last fifty years there has been invented almost every conceivable labor-saving device, with the consequence that the average man is in a state of utter manual incompetence. This is well-known and is often commented upon. But what is not so often observed is that these gadgets are not only labor-saving but brain-saving, thought-saving; and it seems an inescapable conclusion that a correlative mental incompetence is being induced.

A certain amount of resistance seems necessary for the proper functioning of mental and moral attributes, as it is for that of physical attributes. In any of these three departments of life, if you can get results without effort, and habitually do so, the capacity for making the effort dwindles. Whatever takes away the opportunity for effort, whatever obviates or reduces the need for making it, is therefore to some degree deleterious. It needs a bit of brains to manage a furnace-fire successfully; an automatic heater needs none; hence many householders today could not manage a furnace-fire to save their lives. It needs some brainwork to add up a column of figures; running an adding-machine needs nothing but attention; consequently there are many book-keepers and bank-clerks now who not only do not add but cannot. As we all have frequently had occasion to observe, shopkeeping now seldom requires any more strenuous mental exercise than is involved in consulting a price-list. Cooking is a great art, requiring a lot of brain-work; running the modern kitchen requires far less.

(The whole essay is available at IWP Articles. The complete series of Nock’s essays for The American Mercury can be found at JAYS).

Essays by Albert Jay Nock at IWP Articles:

  • Artemus Ward (1924)
  • The Decline of Conversation (1928)
  • A Cultural Forecast (1928)
  • Pantagruelism (1932)
  • Artemus Ward’s America (1934)
  • Isaiah’s Job (1936)
  • Free Speech and Plain Language (1936)
  • College is No Place to Get an Education (1939)
  • The Triumph of the Gadget (1939)

Nock’s complete works are available at JAYS.

Pascal on Eloquence

Jacques Barzun Translation (2003)

  1. Eloquence is the art of saying things in such a way (1) that those to whom we speak are able to hear them without pain and with pleasure; (2) that they feel their self-interest involved, so that self-love leads them the more willingly to think over what has been said. It consists, then, in a correspondence which we try to establish, on the one hand, between the head and the heart of those to whom we speak and, on the other, between the thoughts and the expressions that we use. This presupposes that we have studied the heart of man in order to know all its workings and that we find the right arrangement of the remarks that we wish to make suitable. We must put ourselves in the place of those who are to hear us, and try out on our own heart the appeal we make in what we say, so as to see whether the one is rightly made for the other, and whether we can feel confident that the hearer will be, as it were, forced to surrender. We ought to restrict ourselves, so far as possible, to the simple and natural, and not to magnify that which is small or diminish that which is great. It is not enough that a thing be beautiful; it must be suitable to the subject and there must be in it nothing excessive or lacking.

W. F. Trotter Translation (1958)

  1. Eloquence is an art of saying things in such a way — (1) that those to whom we speak may listen to them without pain and with pleasure; (2) that they feel themselves interested, so that self-love leads them more willingly to reflection upon it. It consists, then, in a correspondence which we seek to establish between the head and the heart of those to whom we speak on the one hand, and, on the other, between the thoughts and the expressions which we employ. This assumes that we have studied well the heart of man so as to know all its powers, and then to find the just proportions of the discourse which we wish to adapt to them. We must put ourselves in the place of those who are to hear us, and make trial on our own heart of the turn which we give to our discourse in order to see whether one is made for the other, and whether we can assure ourselves that the hearer will be, as it were, forced to surrender. We ought to restrict ourselves, so far as possible, to the simple and natural, and not to magnify that which is little, or belittle that which is great. It is not enough that a thing be beautiful; it must be suitable to the subject, and there must be in it nothing of excess or defect.

From Albert Jay Nock, “Liberals Never Learn,” The American Mercury, August, 1937

What I have seen of the Liberal and Progressive movement gives me no wish for its continuance — far from it — and if it disintegrated tomorrow I should be disposed to congratulate the country on its deliverance from a peculiarly dangerous and noisome nuisance. With regard to “all Liberal and Progressive ideas,” I have never been able to make out that there are any. Pseudo-ideas, yes, in abundance; sentiment, emotion, wishful dreams and visions, grandiose castles in Spain, political panaceas and placebos made up of milk, moonshine, and bilge-water in approximately equal parts — yes, these seem to be almost a peculium of Liberalism. But ideas, no.

(The complete series of Nock’s essays for The American Mercury can be found at JAYS).

From “Some of Mayor Gaynor’s Letters and Speeches”

December 4th, 1911.

Dear Mr. Smith: I thank you exceedingly for the edition of Don Quixote which you sent me. The illustrations by Doré are grand. The translation I notice is by Motteux. Of the English translations I deem that by Jarvis the best. It is so deft and nimble. I imagine that it approaches the spirit of the original more nearly than any of the others. When a younger man I often entertained the intention of trying to learn Spanish in order to read Don Quixote in the original. I envy your being able to do so. In translating a work of imagination it is almost always necessary to depart from literalness in order to give the genius and spirit. This Jarvis does, while Motteux is often painfully literal. And yet his literalness brings out some things that should not be lost. For instance, in the account of Don Quixote’s manner of living, and what dishes he ate each day of the week, Jarvis says, “an omelet on Saturdays,” which is certainly common-place enough. But Motteux gives the original exactly, namely, “griefs and groans on Saturdays,” which was some kind of a mixed dish which evidently caused belly ache, or some sort of distress in the paunch. But cases like that are few, and the nimble and light touches of Jarvis which let you right into the spirit of the narrative are often departures from the literal rendering of the original. At best a translation of a work of imagination bears about the same resemblance to the original as the reverse side of a tapestry to the true side. That is why I am sorry I do not understand Spanish as you do. If I did we could continue that discussion of the writings of Cervantes which we commenced on the train up from Richmond.

Let me cite a passage or two to show how much more attractive the translation of Jarvis is. After Don Quixote is knocked down by the sail of the wind-mill, Sancho Panza comes galloping up on Dapple and says, according to Motteux: “Mercy on me, did not I give your Worship fair warning? Did not I tell you they were wind-mills, and that nobody could think otherwise unless he also had wind-mills in his head?” But Jarvis more nimbly says: “God save us, quoth Sancho Panza, did not I warn you to have a care of what you did, for that they were nothing but wind-mills, and nobody could mistake them but one that had the like in his head.” And again, speaking of the company at Antonio’s house who were entertaining Don Quixote, Motteux says: “Among others were two ladies of an airy and waggish disposition.” Contrast this with the way Jarvis puts it: “Among the ladies there were two of an arch and jocose disposition.” But I must not multiply these instances except to quote the rendering of a proverb. Motteux makes Don Quixote say to Sancho: “I have always heard it said that to do a kindness to clowns is like throwing water into the sea.” Jarvis has it that “to do good to the vulgar is to throw water into the sea.”

Cervantes and Shakespeare died on the same day — or rather one died ten days later than the other according to the modern reckoning of time, but I do not remember which. But I find they made use of the same expression. Sancho Panza is made to say, “There is some difference between a hawk and a handsaw.” Shakespeare says in Hamlet, “I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

Years ago I copied every proverb, or philosophical or wise saying there is in Don Quixote. I think that an equal number of good ones is not found in any other book except the Bible. I am half tempted to quote a few to you and let you compare them with the original. “Who but a madman would mind what a madman says,” is one. “Diligence is the mother of good fortune,” is another. And this: “It is pleasant to govern though it be but a flock of sheep.” And this: “Some people go out for wool and come home shorn.” And this: “Letters without virtue are pearls upon a dunghill.” And this: “Though habit and example do much, good sense is the foundation of good language.” And this: “When they give you a heifer be ready with the rope.” And this of the same meaning: “When good fortune knocks, make haste to let her in.” And some or all of those elected to office might well say with Sancho Panza when his old clothes were being taken off and he was being dressed up in his official garments when he was entering upon the government of his island: “Clothe me as you will, I shall be Sancho Panza still.” And it were well if they could all say, as Sancho did when he gave up his governorship and they had stripped him of his official garments to reclothe him with his old ones: “Naked came I into this government and naked come I out of it.” And let me wind up with this one which the ladies might take offense at: “Between the yea and the nay of a woman I would not undertake to thrust the point of a needle.”

And while I am at it, and since we went into this book talk on the train at all, I will set down for you the books which I think have had the largest effect on my life. I will give them in the order in which I think I was affected by them:

The Bible,

Euclid,

Shakespeare,

Hume’s History of England (especially the notes),

Homer,

Milton,

Cervantes (Don Quixote),

Rabelais,

Gil Blas,

Franklin’s Autobiography and letters,

The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini,

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations,

Bacon’s Works.

I have left out of this list those works on what for want of a better name I may call the philosophy of history. I have derived immense satisfaction and, I hope, much profit, from them. And no doubt I have omitted some books I would mention if I took the time.

From Albert Jay Nock, “The Politician’s Opinion of You,” The American Mercury, December, 1936

Edmund Burke, probably the greatest British statesman of all time, once wrote a letter to the Duke of Richmond, criticizing his political associates. He said they were good routineers, first-rate on pushing legislation, strong on winning elections, but no good whatever “on that which is the end and object of all elections, namely: the disposing our people to a better sense of their condition.”

In the language of the street, that seems to be distinctly a new one on us. We never heard that candidates and campaign-managers were supposed to do anything like that, or that elections were held for any such object. Burke’s idea was that the true purpose of an election is to make the people look themselves over and see what sort of folk they actually are, and where they actually stand; and the business of candidates and campaign-managers and politicians generally is to help them do that. His complaint was that his fellow-politicians did not seem to get that idea. He said in some bitterness on another occasion that as things stood, the main business of a politician was “still further to contract the narrowness of men’s ideas, to confirm inveterate prejudices, to inflame vulgar passions, and to abet all sorts of popular absurdities”; and as things stand with us, that is precisely the main business of a politician now.

In the light of the recent election, it might be a good thing for us to put these two sayings of Burke side by side, and think them over. Did our politicians do anything that would enable us to get a better understanding of our actual condition as a people? Not a hand’s turn; not even with regard to our economic condition. On the contrary, they did everything they could to mislead and confuse our understanding, for party purposes. Did they do or say anything to enlarge our ideas, to soften our prejudices, to allay our vulgar passions and discourage our absurdities? Nothing; on the contrary, they justified Burke’s complaint in every particular. Consequently the election has left us with our understanding of our own condition as incorrect and distorted as their best efforts could possibly make it. No wonder Henry Adams said he was going to the Fijis, “where the natives eat one another, and perhaps may eat me, but where they do not have any Presidential elections.”

(The complete series of Nock’s essays for The American Mercury can be found at JAYS).

From Albert Jay Nock, “Progress toward Collectivism,” The American Mercury, February, 1936

An acquaintance said to me the other day that he did not believe the country could stand another four years under Mr. Roosevelt. I said I had no opinion about that; what I was sure of was that no country could stand indefinitely being ruled by the spirit and character of a people who would tolerate Mr. Roosevelt for fifteen minutes, let alone four years. I was of course speaking of the generic Roosevelt; the personal Roosevelt is a mere bit of the Oberhefe which specific gravity brings to the top of the Malebolge of politics. He does not count, and his rule does not count. What really counts is the spirit and character of a people willing under any circumstances whatever to accept the genus, whether the individual specimen who offers himself be named Roosevelt, Horthy, Hitler, Mussolini, or Richard Roe.

(The complete series of Nock’s essays for The American Mercury can be found at JAYS).

From Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man

I have known many persons, some quite intimately, who thought it was their duty to take “the social point of view” on mankind’s many doings and misdoings, and to support various proposals, mainly political, for the mass-improvement of society. One of them is a friend of long standing who has done distinguished service of this kind throughout a lifetime, and is directly responsible for the promulgation of more calamitous and coercive “social legislation” than one could shake a stick at. In a conversation with me not many months ago, this friend said mournfully, “My experience has cured me of one thing. I am cured of believing that society can ever be improved through political action. After this, I shall “cultivate my garden.”

Il faut cultiver notre jardin. With these words Voltaire ends his treatise called Candide, which in its few pages assays more solid worth, more informed common sense, than the entire bulk of nineteenth-century hedonist literature can show. To my mind, those few concluding words sum up the whole social responsibility of man. The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit. In a word, ages of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individualist method which Jesus apparently regarded as the only one whereby the Kingdom of Heaven can be established as a going concern; that is, the method of each one doing his very best to improve one.

In practice, however, this method is extremely difficult; there can be no question about that, for experience will prove it so. It is also clear that very few among mankind have either the force of intellect to manage this method intelligently, or the force of character to apply it constantly. Hence if one “regards mankind as being what they are,” the chances seem to be that the deceptively easier way will continue to prevail among them throughout an indefinitely long future. It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organise something, to institutionalise this-or-that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure-groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for six thousand years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again. This being so, it seems highly probable that the hope for any significant improvement of society must be postponed, if not forever, at any rate to a future so far distant that consideration of it at the present time would be sheer idleness.

Contact, Verb (From Wilson Follett, 1966, Modern American Usage, ed. Jacques Barzun)

Persons old enough to have been repelled by the verb contact when it was still a crude neologism may as well make up their minds that there is no way to arrest or reverse the tide of its popularity. Persons young enough to have picked up the word without knowing that anyone had reservations about it may as well make up their minds that a considerable body of their elders abominate it and would despise themselves if they succumbed to the temptation to use it. In this converted noun we have the perfect example of a coinage that has thirty or forty more years of intolerance to face from a dwindling minority of conservatives while enjoying the full approval — and, more important, the increasing use — of a growing majority that will eventually be unanimous. This clash of generations — a forlorn cultural resistance or a healthy disposition to make the most of linguistic growth, according to how you look at it — is one of the standard phenomena of change.

If in doubt, contact your physician — this locution is as natural to the American of thirty as it is grotesque to the American of sixty, for whom the idea of surfaces touching is the essence of contact. The elderly can therefore see no fitness and no use for the word in its new sense, when the vocabulary already provides consult, ask, approach, get in touch with, confer with, and simply see. Their juniors can perceive no point in forgoing so plainly useful an invention.

The conservative retains one advantage: no one insists that he must use contact, and if he sticks to consult and other inconspicuous synonyms no one will even notice his abstention. But this argument is unlikely to persuade the addicts of contact, who exploit the word because it sounds brisk and comprehensive.

Two other ‘vogue words’ in the same category of nouns converted into verbs for ‘dynamic’ reasons are implement and process. A plan or program is implemented when supplied with the practical apparatus — appropriations, staff, schedule, or what not — needed to carry it out. The word is perhaps a shade less harsh than contact, very likely because of its analogy with tool and retool, standard words for a factory’s preparing to undertake new or increased production. With implement the layman can sound technical. As for the second word, an application, request, memorandum, or some other document is processed when it goes through the usual sequence of consideration, approval, and execution. The word sounds as if it should mean something more exact than considered, appraised, weighed, handled, studied, dealt with, etc., but does it?

It is to be noted that all three of these currently fashionable verbs — contact, implement, process — belong to the proliferating vocabulary of bureaucratic organization, the patter of officialdom. This is a linguistic medium that practically everyone not immersed in it systematically mocks, but meanwhile its toxic properties undermine our resistance, and in the end contemporary speech becomes, regardless of the occasion, more and more bureaucratic.

E. M. Forster on Desmond MacCarthy (Published as a Pamphlet in 1952, by the Mill House Press)

I have not many recollections of the early Desmond MacCarthy, but fortunately I can clearly remember the first time we met. It was about fifty years ago, in Cambridge, and at one of those little discussion-societies which are constantly being born and dying inside the framework of the university. They still continue, I am glad to say, and I know that he too would be glad.

This particular society was called the Apennines. Its invitation-card displayed a range of mountains, and there was also a pun involved, upon which I will not expatiate. I had to read a paper to the Apennines, then I was pulled to pieces, and among my critics was a quiet, dark young man with a charming voice and manner, who sat rather far back in the room, and who for all his gentleness knew exactly what he wanted to say, and in the end how to say it. That was my first impression of him, and I may say it is my last impression also. The young man became an old one and a famous one, but he remained charming and gentle, he always knew his own mind, and he always sat rather far back in the room. Compare him in this respect with that trenchant critic Mr. So-and-So, or with that chatty columnist Sir Somebody Everything, who always manage to sit well in front. I do not think it was modesty on Desmond’s part that made him retiring. He just knew where he wanted to be. Some years after the Apennines, when he was doing literary journalism, he chose for a pseudonym the name “Affable Hawk.” Nothing could have been more apt. He was affable to his fellow writers, whenever possible. But if a book was shallow or bumptious or brutal, then down pounced the hawk, and the victim’s feathers flew.

He and I were always friendly and I stayed with him in Suffolk in those far-off days, and elsewhere later on, but all my vivid memories of him are in a group with other people. So let us now move from Cambridge to London. There, in the early years of this century, I remember a peculiar organisation which had been formed for the purpose of making Desmond write his novel. He wanted to write his novel. He could talk his novel – character, plot, incidents, all were fascinating; I recall a green valley in Wales where a famous picture had got hidden: but he could not get his novel on to paper. So some of his friends thought that if a society was formed at which we all wrote novels and read a fresh chapter aloud at each meeting, Desmond would be reluctantly dragged down the path of creation. Needless to say, he eluded so crude a device. Other people wrote their novels – which usually began well and fell to bits in the second chapter. He – he had forgotten, he had mislaid the manuscript, he had not the time. And he did not write his novel. And after the first world war the group was reconstituted: not to write novels but to write reminiscences.

Here Desmond was supreme. “Memory,” he often said, “is an excellent compositor.” And in the midst of a group which included Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes, he stood out in his command of the past, and in his power to rearrange it. I remember one paper of his in particular – if it can be called a paper. Perched away in a corner of Duncan Grant’s studio, he had a suit-case open before him. The lid of the case, which he propped up, would be useful to rest his manuscript upon, he told us. On he read, delighting us as usual, with his brilliancy, and humanity, and wisdom, until – owing to a slight wave of his hand – the suit-case unfortunately fell over. Nothing was inside it. There was no paper, no manuscript. He had been improvising.

AND/OR (From Wilson Follett, 1966, Modern American Usage, ed. Jacques Barzun)

Whether a lawyer can or cannot make out a case for the necessity of this ungraceful expression in legal documents only a lawyer is competent to say; but anyone else is entitled to the view that it has no right to intrude in ordinary prose. One such intrusion may stand for all: A majority of the tourists come here with camping and/or fishing on their minds. Suppose this to be written with camping or fishing on their minds. How will any sensible reader interpret it? He will presume that some camp without fishing, some fish without camping, and some do both, nothing being said or implied to prevent the three equal possibilities. Note, besides, that these possibilities would be the same if and alone had been used.

We see in this example one of the usual effects of borrowing phraseology from the professions: it kills the plain sense of the words formerly deemed adequate by the layman. That plain sense in the sentence under review is that and can sometimes suggest or, and that generally or includes and. The weatherman’s Snow or sleet tomorrow is no guarantee that we shall have only the one or the other. For generations the chairman has asked Are there corrections or additions to the minutes? well knowing that there may be both. The phrase either… or was invented for situations in which it is important to exclude one of a pair. To be sure, in casual speech you or I must go carries the meaning either you or I; but If he tries that stunt he will be hurt or killed makes it clear that the inclusion of and in or arises naturally from the facts and is habitual for most readers.

Indeed, if the users of and/or were as logical as they pretend to be when they insist on the legalism, they would have to say and or or, since their assumption is that the two cannot co-exist. That assumption is not made better by the punctuation in well, then, there’s Mackenzie and, or, his associates. And if a writer thinks his readers have been so corrupted by the abuse of and/or as to misunderstand his simple or, he should courageously repudiate the hybrid and write – using our first example – tourists come here to camp or fish or both. Let him remember that, except for lawyers, English speakers and writers have managed to express this simple relationship without and/or for over six centuries. This truth is commemorated in the couplet:

Had he foreseen the modern use of and/оr,

It would have sickened Walter Savage Landor.