7 JANUARY 1944, Page 8

IN DEFENCE OF ENGLISH

By ALAN PHILLIPS

Over this imperfectly defended territory in the realm of English culture the attack has an easy time. If we ask who is directing this attack, and where does it originate, we find that the English 11Inguage is now being assailed chiefly from two sides : by perversion of what we already possess and by creation of what we should not desire to possess. This perversion and this unwelcome creation over- lap. They cover the misuse of words and the confusion of parts of speech ; false lines of extension and inconsistency of derivation ; and downright hocus-pocus and trickery.

To be specific, is it not time to .stop this nonsense about a person " being evacuated," which ought to mean having his inside removed? Among the new coinage, " evacuee " is spurious, for it ought to mean a person who has been " evacued." As for the imbecility of " blitz," as noun or worse as verb, applied to bombing, it merits banishment, for its meaning in German is simply lightning. Then let us make away with useless adverbs and prepositions: " share out " and " pay up " and "open up," where the verb alone would take a direct object ; " win out " and " win through " and " write in," where the verb alone suffices; " face up to" and " check up on " supreme examples of two extra words adding nothing. Why must the noun be so terribly overworked an old hack? It has become a transitive verb in " contact " and " postcard." It has for so long done extra duty as an adjective that few will quail before saying "railway journey " or " postage stamp," but this process is going to extremes. Recently an official in the United States announced a " production requirements plan system." But having forced three nouns into the shape of adjectives he found his phrase was still utterly meaningless and had to be explained in acceptable terms. As to mixed metaphors,, even a Cabinet Minister imagines that machinery can take root and bear fruit.

Admittedly, to find nomenclature sufficiently exact and subtle for the technical specialising which goes on today, the experts and students must go some way towards making a new local vocabulary to cover their subject, be it bridge-building or bridge-playing. But do the technicians and scientists have to sup so full with horrors?

Not long ago there was published a paper about Aesthetokinetics,

which is Greek to most people and turns out to be the study of " accident-proneness," which is not English to anyone. In political and economic jargon, the most repellent of all, the sole requirement in creating a word is to fit " -ation" to the end and a litter of prefixes to the beginning of a well-known word. Never mind if the root is not Latin like the accessories ; it may be purely European of today, that does not stave off- a shock like " cartellisation." Next time there is heavy departure of business from London, no doubt this will be described as " redecentralisation." Inventors of words should accept the duty of being scrupulous in their derivation and graceful in their manufacture. , • These perversions and creations, then, 'band themselves together into a united onslaught. One thrust is delivered through the technique of headlines in the popular Press. The modern develop- ment of headlines inches deep would not have arisen if two con- ditions had been preserved: if the paper had space to write its story fully and the public had leisure and training to read it critically. As there is insufficient room for writing and hardly anybody has time for reading, the paper is splashed with groups of words chosen not because they hit the point but because they are brief and easy to manipulate—like our old friends, " aid " and " bid " and " plan" and " urge," which change their parts of speech as wildly as artists in revue: This probably does harm enough to the presentation of news. It certainly does mischief untold to the language.

An external danger, from America, is perhaps the gravest of all. It must be understood here that there is no intention of attacking the American language. The enemies aimed at are English people who apply or misapply to English contexts the American language, which is not just the English language brightened by a fresh sparkle, but a new and still fluid form of expression for a community differing altogether from our own. Many American ideas and objects having become familiar to us here, we rightly give them the names used in the country of their origin. But what we should resist is the -habit of children who see too many films and the rising propenVty a . of our popular literature and Press to describe English ideas and objects in American slang—which usually is becoming out-of-date already in its own land at the moment when we adopt it.

If we can beat off all these attacks on the English language, what are we to do next constructively, not only to keep it alive but to restore it to its incomparable efficiency and dignity? The advocates of Basic English mean well, but their work is not intended to have any bearing on the richness and potentiality of the tongue. At best they might show that it is not a literary crime to be simple and exact. It would be wel' if some modern composers were informed that iris not a disgrace to use the common chord ; but you would not instruct- a pupil very deeply irr music by allowing him to use nothing but the common chord. We cannot expect our language to remain static, never absorbing new words and idioms. Only let these inventions pass the tests of being not ugly or ungrammatical, and insist that they convey some refinement. of meaning which no term already accepted can quite express. Beauty and use, as in every other art, should be married to control the destiny of English. Let us resolve, all of us who care for words and images, in speech or writing to choose among the available store with more care and taste, to shun what we know to be incorrect, and to cast away all poor props of platitudes. Then life and strength will return to the tongue and the pen.