The approaching end of another college year gives peculiar timeliness to
the following account of a recent meeting of the Supercollegiate
Committee on Entrance Examinations. For the details of the story I am
indebted to the able and conscientious correspondent of the
Disassociated Press at Nottingham. The discerning reader will have no
difficulty in identifying the persons mentioned. Professor Münsterberg
is, of course, Professor Münsterberg. Professor Lounsbury is Professor
Lounsbury. Professor Hart is Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. Dr. Woods
Hutchinson is Dr. Woods Hutchinson.
Professor Münsterberg: The meeting will please come to order. We are now
in the first week of October. This fact, which the average citizen has
probably accepted without question, has been amply confirmed in an
elaborate series of laboratory tests carried on by means of white and
yellow cards and rapidly revolving disks. Thus we are prepared to
discuss once more the highly interesting question, why the vast majority
of freshmen cannot spell. Neither can they write their native tongue in
accordance with the rules of grammar.
Professor Lounsbury: Aw, gee! Why should they? Look at Chaucer, Milton,
and Browning. The fiercest bunch of little spellers you ever saw. And
their grammar is simply rotten. They didn't care a red cent for the
grammarians. When they saw a word or a phrase they liked they went to
it. If the grammarians didn't agree with them it was up to the
grammarians. Chaucer should worry.
Dr. Hutchinson: Quite right.
Professor Lounsbury: The question is this: Are freshmen made for the
English language or is language made for freshmen? Language is like a
human being; change does it good. Stick to your Lindley Murray and it's
a cinch your little old English tongue will be a dead one in fifty
years.
Dr. Hutchinson: I agree with Professor Lounsbury, speaking from the
standpoint of physiology. Constant use of a plural verb with a plural
subject plays the deuce with the larynx. You know what the larynx is,
gentlemen. It's the rubber disk in the human Victrola. Drop the pin on
the rubber disk and the record will grind out the same formula, again
and again. Keep it up long enough and the record wears out. That's the
larynx under the operation of grammatical rules. It gets the habit, and
the first law of health is to avoid all habits. What you want to do is
to shake up the larynx by feeding it with new forms of expression. When
a man says "I done it," it imparts a healthy jolt to the delicate
muscles of the throat, limbers up his aorta and his diaphragm, and
reconciles him with his digestion. This is the opinion of eminent
physiologists, like Drinckheimer of Leipzig.
Professor Lounsbury: Whom did you say the man is?
Dr. Hutchinson: Drinckheimer, professor at Leipzig. He doesn't write for
the magazines.
Professor Lounsbury: Then you agree with me that when a man has
something to say he will say it?
Professor Münsterberg: We have an excellent illustration on this point
in a history paper submitted in the last entrance examinations. In reply
to the question, "Name the first two Presidents of the United States,"
one candidate wrote, "The first pressident was Gorge Washington; his
predeceassor was Alexander Hamilton." Observe the extraordinary
psychological correlation between thought and expression in such a
reply.
Professor Hart: I don't think the young man was guilty of an injustice
with regard to Alexander Hamilton. You will recall that Hamilton was one
of the principal founders of the system of privilege which has produced,
in our own day, Lorimerism and the purchase of Southern delegates. If
it had not been for Hamilton and his crowd we should not now be
compelled to wage a campaign for social justice and I should not be
under the necessity of writing Bull Moose history for _Collier's_.
Dr. Hutchinson: But getting back to the real point of our inquiry,
whether the failure to spell and write correctly is a sign of mental
feebleness--
Professor Münsterberg: On that point I believe I can speak with
authority. Psychological tests in the laboratory show that the average
freshman is as quick-witted to-day as his predecessor of fifty or a
hundred years ago. We examined three hundred first-year men from eleven
colleges and universities. Each man was required to peep into a dark
box, shaped like a camera, through an eye-hole sixteen millimetres in
diameter. By pressing a button, light was flashed upon a slip of paper
inside the box, on which was printed, in letters nine millimetres high,
the following question: "What is your favourite breakfast food?" The
candidate was required to signify his answer by tapping with his finger
on the table, one tap for Farinetta, two taps for Dried Husks, three
taps for Atlas Crumbs, and so forth. The average time for three hundred
answers was six and seven-tenths seconds. Thereupon the candidates were
asked to think over the question at their leisure and to hand in a
written answer sworn to before a notary public. On comparing the written
answers with the laboratory results, it appeared that only thirty-seven
out of the three hundred had tapped the wrong answer. Need I say more?
Professor Lounsbury: May I ask how the written answers showed up from
the point of view of spelling and grammar?
Professor Münsterberg: They were impressively defective.
Professor Lounsbury: I'm tickled to death. When you cut out bad spelling
and grammar, you queer the evolution of the English language. There's
nothing to it.
Professor Münsterberg: But take the case of the freshman squad whom we
kept in a hermetically sealed room for twenty-four hours at a
temperature of eighty-nine degrees--
Professor Lounsbury: May I ask what their language was when they were
released at the end of twenty-four hours?
Professor Münsterberg: Truth compels me to say it was something awful.
Professor Lounsbury: But how about the grammar?
Professor Münsterberg: There was no grammar to speak of. They used
mostly interjections.
Dr. Hutchinson: Finest thing in the world, interjections. Good for the
lungs and the heart. Rapid process of inhalation and expulsion keeps the
bellows in prime order. That's all a man is, gentlemen, a bellows on a
pair of stilts driven by a hydraulic pump. If the bellows holds out
under sudden strain, that's all you want. That's why I like to hear
people swear. It's good for the wind. Next time you walk down a step too
many in the dark or lose your hat under a motor truck, don't hold
yourself back. It's the way nature is safeguarding you against asthma.
Professor Münsterberg: Then it is the consensus of opinion here that the
psychological and cultural status of our college freshmen is everything
it ought to be?
Professor Hart: I'd rather take the opinion of a roomful of freshmen on
any subject than the opinion of the United States Supreme Court. They
don't know anything about American history, but it's the kind of history
that isn't worth knowing. I prefer them to know things as they ought to
have been rather than as they were before the Progressive party was
born. Whatever is worth preserving from the past, including the
Decalogue, will be found in the Bull Moose platform. We don't want
examination papers. We want social justice.
Professor Lounsbury: Between you and I, the English language won't get
what's coming to it until all entrance examinations have been chucked
into the discard.
Dr. Hutchinson: Spelling is demonstrably bad for the muscles of the
chest and the abdomen.
Professor Lounsbury: You've said it.