…"it has become the medium, through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought, and so voice the reason of their being." Distinct from journalese, the two yet overlap, "and have a knack of assimilating each other's vices." [1]
American, despite the gallant efforts of the professors, has so far escaped any such suffocating formalization. We, too, of course, have our occasional practitioners of the authentic English Jargon; in the late Grover Cleveland we produced an acknowledged master of it. But in the main our faults in writing lie in precisely the opposite direction. That is to say, we incline toward a directness of statement which, at its greatest, lacks restraint and urbanity altogether, and toward a hospitality which often admits novelties for the mere sake of their novelty, and is quite uncritical of the difference between a genuine improvement in succinctness and clarity, and mere extravagant raciness. "The tendency," says one English observer, "is ... to consider the speech of any man, as any man himself, as good as any other." [2] "All beauty and distinction," says another, [3] "are ruthlessly sacrificed to force." Moreover, this strong revolt against conventional bonds is by no means confined to the folk–speech, nor even to the loose conversational English of the upper classes; it also gets into more studied discourse, both spoken and written. I glance through the speeches of Dr. Woodrow Wilson, surely a purist if we have one at all, and find, in a few moments, half a dozen locutions that an Englishman in like position would never dream of using, among them we must get a move on,[4] hog as a verb,[5] gum–shoe as an adjective with
- ↑ Cf. the chapter, Interlude : On Jargon, in Quiller–Couch's On the Art of Writing; New York, 1916. Curiously enough, large parts of the learned critic's book are written in the very Jargon he attacks.
- ↑ Alexander Francis: Americans: an Impression; New York, 1900.
- ↑ G. Lowes Dickinson, in the English Review, quoted by Current Literature, April, 1910.
- ↑ Speech before the Chamber of Commerce Convention, Washington, Feb. 19, 1916.
- ↑ Speech at workingman's dinner, New York, Sept. 4, 1912.
