MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IREFERRED last week to an anonymous correspondent, whose days are darkened, and whose reading must be seriously hampered, by his hatred of the small word " which." I have myself long since renounced the temptation to improve the style of others, knowing that constant prying and preaching is bad for the soul, wasteful of valuable hours, apt to cause offence, and as ineffective as teaching a herring to dance. Style is as individual as hand-writing or voice, and to reduce it to a uniform or stereotyped pattern is to cage the linnet and to set all Heaven in a rage. The fact that I endeavour, in my modest way, not to bother my friends very insistently about their handling of the English tongue does not mean that I fail to derive enormous enjoyment from the delicacies, quirks, affectations, clumsiness or felicity of other people's sentences. In fact, I find that the pleasure that I take in language, even as the delights derived from art and nature, are among the few that are not dimmed by advancing senility. The shock of surprise resulting from an unusual or daring arrangement of words is as fresh as ever: the resultant satisfaction, on realising that this arrangement was nicely calculated, is .an agreeable satisfaction. It is fascinating, moreover, to pursue words in their slow passage through the centuries and to discover how in one's own life-time certain other words have lost their appeal or changed their significance, status and associations. Nor do I suffer over-much from the introduction of new turns of phrase so long as these are not expressive of some new and atrocious habit of thought. Tolerant I am to our immigrants, happy to introduce them to the society of my own vocables, and conscious always that no living language can be permitted to stand still. Yet sometimes, when one considers the words that have fallen out, the words that have crept in, one sighs at the mutability of human tastes and standards. . * * * * I share, for instance, Logan Pearsall Smith's regret at the tragic downfall of those two fine native adjectives " blooming " and " bloody " ; neither of them could be used upon this page without arousing in the minds of readers associations wholly different from my intent. The adverb " bloody " was in the eighteenth century employed to add emphasis and without any inelegant suggestion. " Are you not sick, my dear? " asks a wife of her husband in one of Swift's stories. ' Bloody sick," he answers, and the effect upon contemporary readers was no more shocking than if today, in similar circumstances, the adverb " very " had been used. Conversely, it is amusing and instructive to trace through the pages of the Oxford Dictionary the varying fortunes of the adjective " nice " and its attendant adverb " nicely." We do not, know what subtle aggregate of misapplications induce the word " nice " to leave the Royal Society and to become a spinster sipping tea. It is possible to attribute much of modern English slang to the influence of American films and stories ; I enjoy American slang when employed by Americans and when I am quite certain that it is correct and up-to-date ; but when I suspect that on English lips these brisk turns of expression are either misapplied or applied two years after having fallen from fashion, 1 feel saddened and unreasonably annoyed. In New York the local slang is authentic in its expression of a native vigour and habit of mind : when transferred to London, mis- pronounced, maladjusted and by then out of fashion, it is as unconvincing as the tweeds donned by French Ministers when attending a presidential shoot at Rambouillet.
* * * * I therefore avoid American slang, using it only with fine reck- lessness in the circle of my more intimate friends. I enjoy inventing my own words from time to time, and flatter myself that occasionally my inventions are philologically correct and quite useful additions to the defaced currency of our ordinary expressions. I like reading about words and place-names, and the works of Professor Weekley and Mr. Eric Partridge provide both stimulus and relaxation. I applaud the efforts made by Sir Alan Herbert or Mr. H. G. Strauss to resist the intrusion of ill- fabrica ted words and to expose the logorrhoea and the dolicho- logia of bureaucrats and business-men. In fact, I seek to adopt towards the ever-passing stream of language the tolerant, appre- ciative and watchful attitude of the immortal Mr. H. J. Fowler. Yet I am conscious that there are certain words and expressions, • current in the language of the younger generation, that fill me with irritation and disturb the tolerance with which I seek to govern my attitude towards the growth or decay of my native tongue. Every generation has, I suppose, a particular word that becomes characteristic and annoyingly reiterant. In my youth we used the word " rather," accenting the last syllable, as an emphatic affirmation, and I suppose that this seemed vulgar and tiresome to our elders. But the youths and maidens of today employ the adverb " actually " with a frequency that tempts me to throw them into vats of burning oil. Can any more idiotic symbol have been invented to proclaim to the world the incerti- tudes of our English youth? It is sadly reminiscent of the adverb " eigentlich," which in the disintegrating years of the Weimar Republic slipped into every sentence that the Germans used. Such propitiatory adverbs are signs of surrender ; even as "eigentlich" presaged the Hitlerjugend, so may " actually " indicate a readiness of our own young generation to accept dogma.
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It is valuable to notice and analyse the expressions that from decade to decade bob on the surface of ordinary conversation ; they often reveal unsuspected doubts and anxieties, or indicate dangerous avenues of escape. Of the countless escape-words. that have accompanied the decline of authority, I should regard the compound " high-brow " as the one that has exercised the most pernicious influence. It was introduced into the United States, as Mr. H. L. Mencken suggests, somewhere about the year 1905, and must have crossed the Atlantic ten years later. Transport was less immediate in those times. The expression " high-brow " was at first employed in this country as an alterna- tive for the older English words prig " and " pedant," and was used to decry those who were pompous or arrogant about their own erudition and contemptuous of the ignorance of others. It was derived presumably from the popular theory that people who possess great learning acquire what Tennyson called the 'bar of Michael Angelo," or protuberant frontal lobes. It was not long, however, before this obnoxious compound was recog- nised as furnishing a magic escape-route for the indolent or the stupid. Hitherto it had been painful to admit that one did not possess sufficient application. education, or intelligence to under- stand the more serious works of art or literature. The intro- duction of the compound " high-brow " enabled those who suffered from such disabilities to escape from their predicament without shame. Henceforward it was not they who were to blame for being too inert to comprehend masterpieces ; it was the masterpieces that were to blame for being so masterly. Thereby the authority, even the desirability, of mind and learning have been much diminished.
* * * * The compound " high-brow " may, after all, be no more than a foolish path of escape for the ninnies of our time ; as such it need not be taken too seriously. It fills me with frequent irrita- tion, with occasional sadness, but seldom with despair. But there is another current phrase that sends a shiver down my spine. It is a Medusa phrase, turning to stone the hearts of those who are addicted to it ; it is a basilisk phrase with granite eyes ; it is a phrase of horrible unhappiness, and it leaves a stench of death upon the air. It is a phrase that frightens me. It is the phrase, " I couldn't care less."
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