The Century Vocabulary Builder Part 2

Express these ideas in simpler language:

The temperature was excessive.

The most youthful of his offspring was not remarkable for personal pulchritude.

Henry Clay expressed a preference for being on the right side of public questions to occupying the position of President of the United States of America.

He who pa.s.ses at an accelerated pace may nevertheless be capable of perusing.

A masculine member of the human race was mounted on an equine quadruped.

But the number of the terms we employ, as well as their ostentatiousness, must be considered. Most of us blunder around in the neighborhood of our meaning instead of expressing it briefly and clearly. We throw a handful of words at an idea when one word would suffice; we try to bring the idea down with a shotgun instead of a rifle. Of course one means of correction is that we should acquire accuracy, a quality already discussed. Another is that we should practice condensation.

First, let us learn to omit the words which add nothing to the meaning.

Thus in the sentence "An important essential in cas.h.i.+ng a check is that you should indorse it on the back," several words or groups of words needlessly repeat ideas which are expressed elsewhere. The sentence is as complete in substance, and far terser in form, when it reads "An essential in cas.h.i.+ng a check is that you should indorse it."

Next, let us, when we may, reduce phrases and even clauses to a word. Thus the clause at the beginning and the phrase at the close of the following sentence const.i.tute sheer verbiage: "Men who have let their temper get the better of them are often in a mood to do harm to somebody." The sentence tells us nothing that may not be told in five words: "Angry men are often dangerous."

Finally, let us subst.i.tute phrases or clauses for unnecessary sentences.

The following series of independent a.s.sertions contains avoidable repet.i.tions: "One morning I was riding on the subway to my work. It was always my custom to ride to my work on the subway. This morning I met Harry Blake." The full thought may better be embodied in a single sentence: "One morning, while I was, as usual, riding on the subway to my work, I met Harry Blake."

By applying these instructions to any page at hand--one from your own writing, one from a letter some friend has sent you, one from a book or magazine--you will often be able to strike out many of the words without at all impairing the meaning. Another means of acquiring succinct expression is to practice the composition of telegrams and cable messages.

You will of course lessen the cost by eliminating every word that can possibly be spared. On the other hand, you must bear it in mind that your punctuation will not be transmitted, and that the recipient must be absolutely safeguarded against reading together words meant to be separated or separating words meant to be read together. That is, your message must be both concise and unmistakably clear.

EXERCISE - Wordiness II

1. Condense the editorial (Appendix 1) by eliminating unnecessary words and finding briefer equivalents for roundabout expressions.

2. Try to condense similarly the Parable of the Sower (Appendix 3) and the Seven Ages of Man (Appendix 4). (The task will largely or altogether baffle you, but will involve minute study of tersely written pa.s.sages.)

3. Condense the following:

A man whose success in life was due solely to his own efforts rose in his place and addressed the man who presided over the meeting.

A girl who sat in the seat behind me giggled in an irritating manner.

We heard the wild shriek of the locomotive. Any sound in that savage region seemed more terrible than it would in civilized surroundings. So as we listened to the shriek of the locomotive, it sounded terrible too.

I heard what kind of chauffeur he was. A former employer of his told me.

He was a chauffeur who speeded in reckless fas.h.i.+on because he was fond of having all the excitement possible.

4. Condense the following into telegrams of ten words or less:

Arrived here in Toledo yesterday morning talked with the directors found them not hostile to us but friendly.

Detectives report they think evidence now points to innocence of man arrested and to former employee as the burglar.

5. The following telegrams are ambiguous. Clarify them.

Jane escaped illness I feared Charley better.

Buy oil if market falls sell cotton.

6. Base a telegraphic night letter of not more than fifty words upon these circ.u.mstances:

(a) You have been sent to buy, if possible and as cheaply as possible, a majority of the stock in a given company. You find that many of the stockholders distrust or dislike the president and are willing to sell.

Some of these ask only $50 a share for their holdings; the owners of 100 shares want as much as $92; the average price asked is $76. By buying out all the president's enemies, which you can now do beyond question, you would secure a bare majority of the stock. But $92 a share seems to you excessive; that is, you think that by working quietly among the president's friends you can get 100 shares at $77 or thereabouts and thus save approximately $1500. On the other hand, should your dealings with the friends of the president give him premature warning, he might stop the sales by these friends and himself begin buying from his enemies, and thus make your purchase of a majority of the stock impossible. Is the $1500 you would save worth the risk you would be obliged to take? You call for instructions.

(b) You are telegraphing a metropolitan paper the results of a Congressional election. Philput, the Republican candidate, leads in the cities, from which returns are now complete. Wilkins, the Democratic candidate, leads in the country, from only certain districts of which-- those nearest the cities--returns have been heard. If the present proportionate division of the rural vote is maintained for the total, Philput will be elected by a plurality of three hundred votes. Philput a.s.serts that the proportions will hold. Wilkins points out, however, that he is relatively stronger in the more remote districts and predicts that he will have a plurality of seven hundred votes. Smallbridge, an independent candidate, is apparently making a better race in the country than in the city, but he is so weak in both places that the ballots cast for him can scarcely affect the outcome unless the margin of victory is infinitesimal.

7. Compress 6a and 6b each into a telegram of not more than ten words.

8. (Do not read this a.s.signment until you have composed the night letters and telegrams called for in 6 and 7.) Compare your first night letter in 6 and your first telegram in 7 with the versions given below. Decide where you have surpa.s.sed these versions, where you have fallen short of them.

_Night letter:_ Two factions in company I can buy from enemies president bare majority stock at average seventy-six but hundred of these shares held at ninety-two I could probably get hundred quietly from friends president about seventy-seven but president might detect move and buy majority stock himself wire instructions. (Fifty words.)

_Telegram_: Wire whether buy safe or risk control saving fifteen hundred. (Ten words.)

A final device for escaping wordiness you will have discovered for yourself while composing telegrams and telegraphic night letters. It is to pa.s.s over details not vital to your purpose. Of course you must have due regard for circ.u.mstances; details needed for one purpose may be superfluous for another. But all of us are familiar with the person who loses her ideas in a rigmarole of prosaic and irrelevant facts. Such a person is Shakespeare's scatter-brained Dame Quickly. On one occasion this voluble woman is shrilly reproaching Sir John Falstaff for his indebtedness to her. "What is the gross sum that I owe thee?" he inquires.

She might answer simply: "If thou wert an honest man, thyself and the money too. Thou didst promise to marry me. Deny it if thou canst."

Instead, she plunges into a prolix recital of the circ.u.mstances of the engagement, so that the all-important fact that the engagement exists has no special emphasis in her welter of words. "If thou wert an honest man,"

she cries, "thyself and the money too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then, as I was was.h.i.+ng thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar; telling us she had a good dish of prawns; whereby thou didst desire to eat some, whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound?

And didst thou not, when she was gone down stairs, desire me to be no more so familiarity with such poor people; saying that ere long they should call me madam? And didst thou not kiss me and bid me fetch thee thirty s.h.i.+llings? I put thee now to thy book-oath; deny it if thou canst."

EXERCISE - Wordiness III

1. Study the following paragraph, decide which ideas are important, and strike out the details that merely clog the thought:

As I stepped into the room, I heard the clock ticking and that caused me to look at it. It sits on the mantelpiece with some layers of paper under one corner where the mantel is warped. When the papers slip out or we move the clock a little as we're dusting, the ticking stops right away. Of course the clock's not a new one at all, but it's an old one. It has been in the family for many a long year, yes, from even before my father's time. Let me see, it was bought by my grandfather. No, it couldn't have been grandfather that bought it; it was his brother. Oh, yes, I remember now; my mother told me all about it, and I'd forgotten what she said till this minute. But really my grandfather's brother didn't exactly buy it. He just traded for it. He gave two pigs and a saddle, that's what my mother said. You see, he was afraid his hogs might take cholera and so he wanted to get rid of them; and as for the saddle, he had sold his riding-horse and he didn't have any more use for that. Well, it isn't a valuable clock, like a grandfather clock or anything of that sort, though it is antique.

As I was saying, when I glanced at it, it read seven minutes to six. I remember the time very well, for just then the factory whistle blew and I remember saying to myself: "It's seven minutes slow today." You see, it's old and we don't keep it oiled, and so it's always losing time. Hardly a day pa.s.ses but I set it up--sometimes twice a day, as for the matter of that--and I usually go by the factory whistle too, though now and then I go by Dwight's gold watch. Well, anyhow, that tells me what time it was.

I'm certain I can't be wrong.

2. Study, on the other hand, The Castaway (Appendix 5) for its judicious use of details. Defoe in his stories is a supreme master of verisimilitude (likeness to truth). As we read him, we cannot help believing that these things actually happened. More than in anything else the secret of his lifelikeness lies in his constant faithfulness to reality. He puts in the little mishaps that would have befallen a man so situated, the things he would have done, the difficulties he might have avoided had he exercised forethought. Though Defoe had little insight into the complexities of man's inner life, he has not been surpa.s.sed in his acc.u.mulations of naturalistic outer details. These do not c.u.mber his narrative; they contribute to its purpose and add to its effectiveness. In this selection (Appendix 5) observe how plausible are such homely details as Crusoe's seeing no sign of his comrades "except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows"; as his difficulty in getting aboard the s.h.i.+p again; and as his having his clothes washed away by the rising of the tide. Find half a dozen other such incidents that You consider especially effective.

We may pitch our talk or our writing in almost any I key we choose. Our mood may be dreamy or eager or hilarious or grim or bl.u.s.tering or somber or bantering or scornful or satirical or whatever we will. But once we have established the tone, we should not--except sometimes for broadly humorous effects--change it needlessly or without clear forewarning. If we do, we create a one or the other of two obstacles, or both of them, for whoever is trying to follow what we say. In the first place, we obscure our meaning. For example, we have; been speaking ironically and suddenly swerve into serious utterance; or we have been speaking seriously and then incongruously adopt an ironic tone. How are our listeners, our readers to take us? They are puzzled; they do not know. In the second place, we offend--perhaps in insidious, indefinable fas.h.i.+on--the esthetic proprieties; we violate the natural fitness of things. For example, we have been speaking with colloquial freedom, sprinkling our discourse with _shouldn't_ and _won't;_ suddenly we be come formal and say _should not_ and will _not_. Our meaning is as obvious as before, but the verbal harmony has been interrupted; our hearers or readers are uneasily aware of a break in the unity of tone.

A speaker or writer is a host to verbal guests. When he invites them to his a.s.sembly, he gives each the tacit a.s.surance that it will not be brought into fellows.h.i.+p with those which in one or another of a dozen subtle ways will be uncongenial company for it. He must never be forgetful of this unspoken promise. If he is to avoid a linguistic breach, he must constantly have his wits about him; must study out his combinations carefully, and use all his knowledge, all his tact. He will make due use of spontaneous impulse; but that this may be wise and disciplined, he will form the habit of curiosity about words, their stations, their savor, their apt.i.tudes, their limitations, their outspokenness, their reticences, their affinities and antipathies. Thus when he has need of a phrase to fill out a verbal dinner party, he will know which one to select.

Certain broad cla.s.sifications of words are manifest even to the most obtuse user of English. _Shady, behead_, and _lying_ are "popular" words, while their synonyms _umbrageous_ decapitate,_ and _mendacious_ are "learned" words. _Flabbergasted_ and _higgledy-piggledy_ are "colloquial," while _roseate_ and _whilom_ are "literary." _Affidavit, allegro_, _lee sh.o.r.e_, and _pinch hit_ are "technical," while _vamp_, _savvy, b.u.m hunch_, and _skiddoo_ are "slang." It would be disenchanting indeed were extremes of this sort brought together. But offenses of a less glaring kind are as hard to shut out as February cold from a heated house.

Unusual are the speeches or compositions, even the short ones, in which every word is in keeping, is in perfect tune with the rest.

For the attainment of this ultimate verbal decorum we should have to possess knowledge almost unbounded, together with unerring artistic instinct. But diction of a kind only measurably inferior to this is possible to us if we are in earnest. To attain it we must study the difference between abstract and concrete terms, and let neither intrude unadvisedly upon the presence or functions of the other; do the same by literal and figurative terms and instruct ourselves in the nature and significance of connotation.

Before considering these more detailed matters, however, we may pause for a general exercise on verbal harmony.

EXERCISE - Discords