look a bit awkward, but I have had a lot of trouble with that
sentence and I came to the conclusion that I’d rather have it
clumsy than obscure.” I pointed out have the “tree-trunk which” was
surely not what he meant, but that the faults of the sentence lay
deeper than that. He was using words not as winged angels always
ready to do his command, but as lifeless counters, weights,
measures, or automatic engines wrongly adjusted. A _grub_ cannot
_manufacture_ a _channel_. Even a human being who can manufacture a
boot or a box can only _scoop_ or _dig_ a channel. And you can only
have a _channel_ on the outer surface of a tree; inside a tree you
have _tunnels_. A tunnel you _drive_ or _bore_. A grub cannot be
_within_ either a channel or a tunnel (surely) in the same way as a
fly is found _within_ a piece of amber. Doctor X excused himself by
saying that “scientists are usually functionally incapable of
visualization,” and that “normal mental visualization is dangerous,
and abnormal visualization fatal to scientific theorizations, as
offering tempting vistas of imaginative synthetical concepts
unconfirmed by actual investigation of phenomena”--or words to that
effect. Unaware of the beam in his own eye, our Doctor complains
more than once in his book of the motes in the public eye, of the
extended popular application of scientific terms to phenomena for
which they were never intended, until they become like so many
blunted chisels. On the other hand, he would be the first to
acknowledge that over-nice definition is, for scientific purposes,
just as dangerous as blurring of sense; Herr Einstein was saying
only the other day that men become so much the slaves of words that
the propositions of Euclid, for instance, which are abstract
processes of reason only holding good in reference to one another,
have been taken to apply absolutely in concrete cases, where they
do not. Over-definition, I am trying to show, discourages any
progressive understanding of the idea for which it acts as
hieroglyph. It even seems that the more precisely circumscribed a
word, the less accurate it is in its relation to other
closely-defined words.
There is a story of a governess who asked her charges what was the
shape of the earth? “It may conveniently be described as an oblate
spheroid” was the glib and almost mutinous answer. “Who told you
girls that?” asked the suspicious Miss Smithson. A scientific elder
brother was quoted as authority, but Miss Smithson with commendable
common sense gave her ruling, “Indeed that may be so, and it may be
not, but it certainly is _nicer_ for little girls to say that the
earth is more or less the shape of an orange.”
From which fruit, as conveniently as from anywhere else, can be
drawn our homely moral of common sense in the use of words. As
every schoolboy I hope doesn’t know, the orange is the globose
fruit of that rutaceous tree the _citrus aurantium_, but as every
schoolboy certainly is aware, there are several kinds of orange on
the market, to wit the ordinary everyday sweet orange from Jaffa
or Jamaica, the bitter marmalade orange that either comes or does
not come from Seville, the navel orange, and the excellent “blood,”
with several other varieties. Moreover the orange has as many
_points_ as a horse, and parts or processes connected with its
dissection and use as a motor-bicycle. “I would I were an Orange
Tree, that busie Plante,” sighed George Herbert once. I wonder how
Herbert would have anatomized his Orange, then a rarer fruit than
today when popular affection and necessary daily intercourse have
wrapped the orange with a whole glossary of words as well as with
tissue-paper. Old gentlemen usually _pare_ their oranges, but the
homophonic barrage of puns when Jones _père_ prepares to pare a
pair of--even oranges (let alone another English-grown fruit), has
taught the younger generations either to peel a norange or skin
their roranges. _Peel_ (subst.) is ousting _rind_; a pity because
there is also _peal_ as a homophone; but I am glad to say that what
used to be called _divisions_ are now almost universally known as
_fingers_ or _pigs_ (is the derivation from the tithe-or parson’s
pig known by its extreme smallness?); the seeds are “pips,” and
quite rightly too, because in this country they are seldom used for
planting, and “pip” obviously means that when you squeeze them
between forefinger and thumb they are a useful form of minor
artillery; then there is the white pithy part under the outer rind;
I have heard this called _blanket_, and that is pretty good, but I
have also heard it called _kill-baby_, and that is better; for me
it will always remain _kill-baby_. On consulting _Webster’s
International Dictionary_ I find that there is no authority or
precedent for calling the withered calix on the orange the _kim_,
but I have done so ever since I can remember, and have heard the
word in many respectable nurseries (it has a fascination for
children), and I can’t imagine it having any other name. Poetical
wit might call it “the beauty-patch on that fairy orange cheek”;
heraldry might blazon it, on _tenne_, as a _mullet, vert, for
difference_; and contemporary slang would probably explain it as
that “rotten little star-shaped gadget at the place where you shove
in your lump of sugar”; but _kim_ is obviously the word that is
wanted, it needs no confirmation by a Dictionary Revisal Committee
or National Academy. There it is, you can hardly get away from it.
Misguided supporters of the Society for Pure English, resisting the
impulse to say casually “the yellow stuff round my yorange” and
“the bits inside, what you eat,” and knowing better than to give us
_exocarp_, _carpel_, and _ovule_, will, however, perhaps
misunderstand the aims of the Society by only using literary and
semi-scientific language, by insisting on _paring_ the _integument_
and afterwards removing the _divisions_ of their fruit for
_mastication_. But pure English does not mean putting back the
clock; or doing mental gymnastics. Let them rather (when they don’t
honestly push in that lump of sugar and suck) _skin_ off the
_rind_, ignoring the _kim_ and scraping away the _kill-baby_, then
pull out the _pigs_, _chew_ them decently, and put the _pips_ to
their proper use.
Good English surely is clear, easy, unambiguous, rich,
well-sounding, but not self-conscious; for too much pruning
kills....
THE END
* * * * *
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
He fell in victory’s pierce pursuit=> He fell in victory’s fierce
pursuit {pg 55}