To the Editor of the S. P. E. tracts.

Sir,

As one rather more interested in the choice, use, and blending of words than in the niceties of historical grammar, and having no greater knowledge of etymology than will occasionally allow me to question vulgar derivations of place-names, I would like to sound a warning against the attempt to purify the language too much—“one word, one meaning” is as impossible to impose on English as “one letter, one sound.” By all means weed out homophones, and wherever a word is overloaded and driven to death let another bear part of the burden; suppress the bastard and ugly words of journalese or commerce; keep a watchful eye on the scientists; take necessary French and Italian words out of their italics to give them an English spelling and accentuation; call a bird or a flower by its proper name, revive useful dialect or obsolescent words, and so on; that is the right sort of purification, but let it be tactfully done, let the Dictionary be a hive of living things and not a museum of minutely ticketed fossils. A common-sense precision in writing is clearly necessary; one has only to read a page or two of Nashe, Lyly, or (especially) the lesser Euphuists to come to this conclusion; their sentences often can have meant no more to themselves than a mere grimace or the latest sweep of the hat learned in Italy. A common-sense precision, yes, but when the pedantic scientist accuses the man in the street of verbal inexactitude the latter will do well to point out to the scientist that of all classes of writers, his is the least accurate of any in the use of ordinary words. Witness a typical sentence, none the better for being taken from a book which has made an extremely important contribution to modern psychological research, and is written by a scientist so enlightened that, dispensing almost entirely with the usual scientific jargon, he has improvised his own technical terms as they are needed for the argument. Very good words they are, such as would doubtless be as highly approved by the Society for Pure English, in session, as they have been by the British Association. This Doctor X is explaining the unaccountable foreknowledge in certain insects of the needs they will meet after their metamorphosis from grub to moth. He writes:

... This grub, after a life completely spent within the channels in a tree-trunk which it itself manufactures....

“Yes,” said Doctor X to me, “somehow the two it’s coming together look a bit awkward, but I have had a lot of trouble with that sentence and I came to the conclusion that I’d rather have it clumsy than obscure.” I pointed out have the “tree-trunk which” was surely not what he meant, but that the faults of the sentence lay deeper than that. He was using words not as winged angels always ready to do his command, but as lifeless counters, weights, measures, or automatic engines wrongly adjusted. A grub cannot manufacture a channel. Even a human being who can manufacture a boot or a box can only scoop or dig a channel. And you can only have a channel on the outer surface of a tree; inside a tree you have tunnels. A tunnel you drive or bore. A grub cannot be within either a channel or a tunnel (surely) in the same way as a fly is found within a piece of amber. Doctor X excused himself by saying that “scientists are usually functionally incapable of visualization,” and that “normal mental visualization is dangerous, and abnormal visualization fatal to scientific theorizations, as offering tempting vistas of imaginative synthetical concepts unconfirmed by actual investigation of phenomena”—or words to that effect. Unaware of the beam in his own eye, our Doctor complains more than once in his book of the motes in the public eye, of the extended popular application of scientific terms to phenomena for which they were never intended, until they become like so many blunted chisels. On the other hand, he would be the first to acknowledge that over-nice definition is, for scientific purposes, just as dangerous as blurring of sense; Herr Einstein was saying only the other day that men become so much the slaves of words that the propositions of Euclid, for instance, which are abstract processes of reason only holding good in reference to one another, have been taken to apply absolutely in concrete cases, where they do not. Over-definition, I am trying to show, discourages any progressive understanding of the idea for which it acts as hieroglyph. It even seems that the more precisely circumscribed a word, the less accurate it is in its relation to other closely-defined words.

There is a story of a governess who asked her charges what was the shape of the earth? “It may conveniently be described as an oblate spheroid” was the glib and almost mutinous answer. “Who told you girls that?” asked the suspicious Miss Smithson. A scientific elder brother was quoted as authority, but Miss Smithson with commendable common sense gave her ruling, “Indeed that may be so, and it may be not, but it certainly is nicer for little girls to say that the earth is more or less the shape of an orange.”

From which fruit, as conveniently as from anywhere else, can be drawn our homely moral of common sense in the use of words. As every schoolboy I hope doesn’t know, the orange is the globose fruit of that rutaceous tree the citrus aurantium, but as every schoolboy certainly is aware, there are several kinds of orange on the market, to wit the ordinary everyday sweet orange from Jaffa or Jamaica, the bitter marmalade orange that either comes or does not come from Seville, the navel orange, and the excellent “blood,” with several other varieties. Moreover the orange has as many points as a horse, and parts or processes connected with its dissection and use as a motor-bicycle. “I would I were an Orange Tree, that busie Plante,” sighed George Herbert once. I wonder how Herbert would have anatomized his Orange, then a rarer fruit than today when popular affection and necessary daily intercourse have wrapped the orange with a whole glossary of words as well as with tissue-paper. Old gentlemen usually pare their oranges, but the homophonic barrage of puns when Jones pÈre prepares to pare a pair of—even oranges (let alone another English-grown fruit), has taught the younger generations either to peel a norange or skin their roranges. Peel (subst.) is ousting rind; a pity because there is also peal as a homophone; but I am glad to say that what used to be called divisions are now almost universally known as fingers or pigs (is the derivation from the tithe-or parson’s pig known by its extreme smallness?); the seeds are “pips,” and quite rightly too, because in this country they are seldom used for planting, and “pip” obviously means that when you squeeze them between forefinger and thumb they are a useful form of minor artillery; then there is the white pithy part under the outer rind; I have heard this called blanket, and that is pretty good, but I have also heard it called kill-baby, and that is better; for me it will always remain kill-baby. On consulting Webster’s International Dictionary I find that there is no authority or precedent for calling the withered calix on the orange the kim, but I have done so ever since I can remember, and have heard the word in many respectable nurseries (it has a fascination for children), and I can’t imagine it having any other name. Poetical wit might call it “the beauty-patch on that fairy orange cheek”; heraldry might blazon it, on tenne, as a mullet, vert, for difference; and contemporary slang would probably explain it as that “rotten little star-shaped gadget at the place where you shove in your lump of sugar”; but kim is obviously the word that is wanted, it needs no confirmation by a Dictionary Revisal Committee or National Academy. There it is, you can hardly get away from it. Misguided supporters of the Society for Pure English, resisting the impulse to say casually “the yellow stuff round my yorange” and “the bits inside, what you eat,” and knowing better than to give us exocarp, carpel, and ovule, will, however, perhaps misunderstand the aims of the Society by only using literary and semi-scientific language, by insisting on paring the integument and afterwards removing the divisions of their fruit for mastication. But pure English does not mean putting back the clock; or doing mental gymnastics. Let them rather (when they don’t honestly push in that lump of sugar and suck) skin off the rind, ignoring the kim and scraping away the kill-baby, then pull out the pigs, chew them decently, and put the pips to their proper use.

Good English surely is clear, easy, unambiguous, rich, well-sounding, but not self-conscious; for too much pruning kills....