The Cat is on the Mat

By STR1X AsT night in a place where from time to time Li I go for a drink a big, fat man with a scowl on his face stalks up to me and says : 'Most of the words you use in those things you write each week are far too long. I do not like long words; lots of us round here do not like them. We do not know what some of them mean, or at least we are not sure if we do. They give us a pain in the neck. What the hell is wrong with short words? Why do you not use more of them? It may be that you think it is smart to write the way you do. Well, I and my pals do not share that view. See?'

I turn pale. 'Do you mean,' I ask him, 'that you wish me to change my style?'

'I mean just that,' he says. He has a hard, cold eye like a snake. 'Lay off the long words from now on. Stick to short ones.'

'How short do they have to be?' I bleat.

'As short as they come !' he snaps.

'Do you mean,' I gasp, 'that all the words I use have got to be mon ' He jumps down my throat. 'There you go!' he shouts. 'Can you not leave long words out of it? You tried to sneak one in then, did you not? You had best watch your step!' And he lets fly a foul oath which I canoot print here as one of the words in it is a non-mon.

Meek as an eft, I say that I will do my best.

am sure it will not be hard to do the task I have been set. Just now, it is true, I feel like one, 'who tries to walk on stilts in deep sand; but that is not to say that I will not soon get the knack and that a great spate of Eng. Lit. (verb, sap. in this case) will start to flow from my pen.

So far the worst snag seems to be the choice of a theme. When we start to learn to write we are taught to use none save les mots k's plus courts, as the French say; and since this is so you might think that to write in this way is kid stuff and does not call for much nous.

You can take it from me that this is not the case. The world in which we live is far from rich in the sort of theme, on which even a glib old hack like me can write the best part of a page of prose in words of not more than one—well, you know what I mean : in mons.

Still, it has got to be done. I have set my hand to the plough, and I do not mean to shirk or scamp the job. I could, of course, just write 'The cat is on the mat' and a lot more stuff like that and go on and on and on, though it made ne sense at all, till I had done my stint. But I scorn to stoop to such a low dodge. It would bore yoU stiff, and it might rouse the ire of the Ed. and lead him to think twice ere he paid me the small fee which helps to keep the wolf from my door.

What does make me sad is that so far there are no signs that my Muse is, as one says of a horse, up to the bit. She and I do not seem to have found our length yet. I felt sure that We would get the hang of this new, grape-shot style in a trice and then the sparks would start to ilY and the next thing we would know there would be a page and a half in the Lit. Sup. on `Strix: The New Look.' But some je ne sais quoi tellS me that things are not going to work out like that, worse luck.

Ah well, Mel yii fa-tzu, as the Chinks say; in case you do not know, that means 'There is no help for it, there is no way out.'

Gosh! That is a bright wheeze! I wish I kneW a bit more Chung kuo hwa. They go in for mons. in a big way; in fact they use nought else. But 1 dare say that it would look a shade—well, ping fu, as Li Po might have put it—were I to drag in a lot of quips and saws from the Far East which were not in the strict sense of the phrase ad rem. So I fear that line is no good. Oh dear!

Who was it who wrote : 'Does the road wind up hill all the way?

Yes, to they Whew! That was a close shave; and I thought I was on to a cinch. But the bit I quote will shoW you the way I feel. The strain is, as near as makes no odds, more than I can stand. And what is it all in aid of? Are all of you like the big fat man and his chums? Do the long words which I ant wont, or was wont, to use set your teeth on edge, tax your wits too far, rouse your bile, and bring on Angst? And if they do, are these short, small words, these runts of speech which I have been at such pains to round up, more to your taste? No doubt the long and the short of it is that you do not much care, in which style I grind out my tosh. I hope this is so and that next week I may go back to my long words sans peur if not sans the rest of it. For to be frank this tour tie force has left me (as in days gone by the French said of an old cab-horse on its last legs) sur les dents; and my guess is, it is all hell to a hotcross bun that things are much the same with you.