The Wanganui Chronicle SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 1931. OF WORDS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 138, 13 June 1931, Page 6

The Wanganui Chronicle SATURDAY, JUNE 13, 1931. OF WORDS.

“QF the making of many books there is no enJ,” complained the preacher many centuries before our era, let alone before the days of printing. “The making of books!” What goes to the making of books? This question presumes that we are agreed upon what a book is. But are we agreed" Let us find first what a book is not. At base, a book is not a disorderly collection of words, anymore than it is a eross-word puzzle, for words are used to denote thoughts, and words in disorder do not record thought at all. They are medley, and medley is material minus mind—pardon the alliteration. Before we can have a book, therefore, we must have a mind to direct and use the words. Words, therefore, are like bricks to the builder, but a builder to succeed Inust build to a plan; and so must the builder of a book. The author may have an ordered mind, ordered that is, in a mechanical sort of way. may, thereupon, expect the mechanical thinker to be the producer of words in proper regimentation, each behind the other, a follow-my-leader sort of style. The result would, of course, be a dictionary. But the builders of dictionaries are not robot men by any means. Take old Doctor Johnson, for instance. What a jolly old gentleman he was. He called for Ids pipe, he called for his glass, but he never called for his fiddlers three, first, because he had not got any fiddlers, and second, he would not have listened to them in any ease. He was too busy laying down the law to “Noll” Goldsmith, to Burke, to Sheridan, and occasionally listening to Sir Joshua .Reynolds. How, these old cronies enjoyed lark pie’ at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street! They call that big pie Doctor Johnson pie now, but it is bigger even than the old doctor could eat. It stands five feet high to start with. Dictionaries really are jolly things, made by the most exploratory minds that exist. One of the sturdiest of the dictionary makers did his best work while confined within a criminal lunatic asylum for shooting a man. He was a happy gentleman despite the curtailment of his liberty, and although an American he did much good for the English language. Needless to say, lie was never a film editor. Air H. W. Fowler is another entertaining writer who enjoys himself tracking down words and phrases. You can find his work in the concise Oxford dictionary, but his great joy is in fixing words, terms and phrases. He has skewered a lot of them into their proper place, so to speak, in his “Dictionary of Modern English Usage.” How he enjoys himself in this book I Of the split infinitive he observes: “The English speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither known nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much ; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish. Then he provides nearly three pages of elaboration on the five classes. Jolly fellow, Fowler! But the makers of books have done their jobs well and ill, without knowing into which of Air Fowler’s classes they really and truly belong. The reason for this is that it is the man with an idea or ideas who makes books. As the architect conceives in his mind the scheme of a great cathedral, without regard to the bricks, so the builder of books uses words to build up his mental structure. Milton was a bad speller throughout his life and Shakespeare did not trouble much how he spelt his own name. He would have considered it as boring to have signed himself, William Hathaway Shakespeare, or W. Hattawny Shakespeare for short, as the speedy Americans do to-day. No, just Will Shakespeare! A]l he was concerned about was that his actors knew what was meant. He used words, not as ends, but as odds and ends, and fitted them in to express his ideas. That is the peculiar thing about words: pay attention to them and they clutter up your path, grab the first one that comes along by the short hairs, stick him into the place he fits and words become splendid servants and do their work well. A gentleman outside our window, well the words he uses proclaim him to be hardly a gentleman, is revealing his mastery of words and phrases that Air Fowler does not sanction in his modern English usage. There is hardly any doubt about the modernity of the street exhibition, but it grieves us to say that the exponent is not a master. Forcible? I es; lurid? quite; emotional positively so; but lie is a failure, he is not a master of the language he uses: the language he uses is the master of him. Make words your constant servants, never become a slave io phrases, and some day too, you may write a book, for of the writing of books there is no end. But if you do so write a book think of. the man of old time who complained that, “much reading was a weariness of the flesh.” What would he say of today's output?