In combination with After Henry, Jacques Barzun's A Word or Two Before You Go... proves how poorly I remember books. Perhaps because Barzon has a French name, I was sure this was a work of impenetrable literary criticism. I think I was confusing it with Umberto Eco's Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, because this book is, instead, a collection of amusing, if dated, short essays on language usage.
The editors do a poor job of indicating the original dates essays were written; many date from the 1950s while others were written in the 1980s. The essays that date from the 50s are a hoot. One the one hand, they prove that "current" concerns about the English language have a long history and rich tradition: language is becoming too jargony and abstract, we complain, just as Barzun and others have been complaining for decades. George Orwell began his famous essay "Politics and the English Language" with the words, "Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way," and those words are as fresh today as when Orwell wrote them in 1946.
Barzun, though, says that the language has always been in a bad way, so far as the uneducated and poorly-educated have gone. He means that what "people who bother with the matter at all" think of as good usage has always been limited to a relatively small number of people who care about that sort of thing, and he suggests that our current (current when he was writing, in any case) perception that bad usage is becoming more widespread has to do with the fact that we are educating more and more people, and not doing it very well, and these people are having more and more influence.
This book is a keeper by the "read-aloud" criterion: I found myself repeatedly interrupting David, who was engrossed in a book of his own, to read some particularly funny or particularly true passage. Many of the essays do feel timely, and those which seems dated are fascinating in their own way. For instance, Barzun cannot conceive that "seatbelt," without a hyphen, will ever come into common usage; it's simply too barbaric. On the other hand, he worries about the growing influence of words and phrases that have, by now, faded so completely that I had never heard them before, like alternativing and conscientization. And on the third hand, he sometimes simply mystifies, as wehn he decries the use of "comprised" in the following sentence, which he calls "illogical": "water is comprised of hydrogen and oxygen" (39). I pulled David away from his novel: "What's wrong with that?" I asked him. "I dunno," David replied. Clearly, whatever metamorphosis comprised was underdoing mid-century was complete before David and I became literate, because if "comprised" doesn't mean "made up of," we cannot imagine what it does mean. (Actually, I just looked it up, and it means something like encompass or include, so I can see that Barzun's point would be well-taken at the time he was writing. Something like "water comprises hydrogen and oxygen" would have made better sense to him, I think, though it would not have carried the meaning that water consists only of those two elements.)
This book is also a keeper by the criterion that I might want to share it with interested others, and by the criterion that I might want to foist parts of it on my children during the homeschool process. In the spirit of sharing, let me offer you the passage that opens the book:
No doubt about it, the meaning of the word literate has taken a hitch upward. It used to designate those who would read and write. Now reviewers praise an author or a book for being literate, as if it were hardly to be expected. (3)Posted by Su Penn at June 18, 2003 08:15 AM | TrackBack