Wise Words About Words
COOPER, ALAN
Wise Words About Words Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers By Jacques Barzun Harper & Row. 205 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Alan Cooper Chairman, Department of English, York College, City...
...He attacks abuses without insulting the reader, and he provides illuminating examples of good style...
...Questions of taste, of course, leave room for differences...
...Barzun convinces...
...In dealing with the students I have had the special obligation of finding ways to arouse their dormant attention to words, so that they could in the end edit themselves...
...I would quarrel with certain of Barzun's locutions...
...For it proffers genuine help to authors of anything from novels to interoffice memos...
...To dress them up or combine them unnaturally is to violate their beings...
...Every handbook tells the beginning writer to avoid a primer style...
...Considering the sound and "tune" of this "efficient" writing, Barzun invokes the authority of taste: "It may be said of certain tones that they cause weariness before the end is reached...
...They have personalities...
...Yet there is little evidence here of the merciless irony with which the recently retired Barzun was once known to devastate Columbia University graduate students on Morn-ingside Heights...
...Say Bad weather will prevent " For Barzun, words are alive...
...The answer, Barzun tells us, lies in the word itself: "Pre-empt means only to buy first, by extension to put in the first claim...
...For some time now we have been hearing laments over the impending death of the language...
...Apparently, what has been needed is a readable rhetoric, one that would so distress the misuser of language that he would reform himself in order to avoid offending, Jacques Barzun has written such a book...
...The change of programs for a given hour is not done by the replacement pre-empting the time...
...Jacques Barzun has no anodynes for the agony of writing, though...
...Can a radio program be "pre-empted" by emergency news coverage, or can a military analyst refer to a "pre-emptive strike...
...It is a waste of eyesight and brain tissue to read: The weather conditions continue adverse to flying...
...In a preface Barzun tells us of his qualifications for writing the book: "I have never taught a course in composition...
...Still, Simple & Direct returns us to the mot juste, and therefore to English, a precise language capable of making the subtlest distinctions...
...But for nearly half a century, I have almost continually been engaged in editing the work of students, colleagues and friends...
...he does not prescribe...
...They must be allowed to speak for themselves...
...Other word watchdogs deplore the fact that radio and television broadcasters and print journalists frequently blur their meanings...
...Instead he urges a sensitivity to language, with the assurance that the agony can yield pleasure...
...Of this staccato incoherence it must be said that it is tiresome from the beginning...
...and some of the exercises are as painful as they are helpful—presenting sentences out of context that we hate on cue but can revise only tentatively...
...it is just the opposite...
...Russia's pre-emptive strike is surely preventive and nothing more.' Admonished to attend to meanings, the reader of Simple & Direct will find himself reacquiring (or acquiring if he has never had it) the habit of consulting the dictionary...
...The word to use is displace...
...It is largely these examples that raise Simple & Direct above the level of a college handbook...
...Novelist Jean Stafford campaigns nationally for correct usage...
...Ideas will best slide into the reader's mind when the word noise is least," he counsels...
...But Barzun's suggestions also extend to less tangible matters...
...Harbrace's unimpeachable advice, for instance, is to "combine a related series of short sentences into longer, more effective units.' Yet the hack imitator of Hemingway working his cool "rat-tat-tat" prose may deny that the rule applies to him...
...Time magazine asks, "Can't anyone here speak English...
...Whereas Harbrace, the most widely read handbook, tells students to "make sure that every word has a reason for being there, and eliminate all deadwood," Barzun moves the reader to remember this basic rule of economy by appealing to his self-interest...
...As an historian of culture, Barzun insists on etymology, the history within language...
...Reviewed by Alan Cooper Chairman, Department of English, York College, City University of New York Long after Edwin Newman's best seller, Strictly Speaking, has disappeared from the racks of supermarkets, serious writers will be pondering Simple & Direct...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 6
