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And I suppose the title of the piece is a case in point, for my intent is to tell you, if I can, what goes on when a decision has to be made about a word. For a writer each word constitutes a decision. I could have said “stands for,” but that can imply a substituting, and the fact is that the word is the decision itself, it is constituted. “Stands for” would have been a breath of fresh air in a heavy antechamber, for this is after all only the first paragraph and you have every reason to expect that the going gets worse if it starts out this way, but I’ll have to drop the pressure some other way. Say, did you hear about the traveling salesman who . . .

My first choice of title, not first by choice but first in consciousness, was “Hack Journalist Tells All,” because I do pride myself on being a strict hack, able to write fairly presentable stuff on almost any subject at a moment’s notice, and remembering Doctor Johnson’s bracing epigram that only a blockhead would write for any reason other than money, but I shied away from that title because I have already been accused in national review, by a certified California economist, of being a journalist, and there’s no need to add my two cents’ worth of agreement to his fulminating praise. I threw out the title because it seemed egotistical; I wanted the wind to blow toward the act of writing, not toward the writer.

WR

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William F. Rickenbacker

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And I suppose the title of the piece is a case in point, for my intent is to tell you, if I can, what goes on when a decision has to be made about a word. For a writer each word constitutes a decision. I could have said “stands for,” but that can imply a substituting, and the fact is that the word is the decision itself, it is constituted. “Stands for” would have been a breath of fresh air in a heavy antechamber, for this is after all only the first paragraph and you have every reason to expect that the going gets worse if it starts out this way, but I’ll have to drop the pressure some other way. Say, did you hear about the traveling salesman who . . .

My first choice of title, not first by choice but first in consciousness, was “Hack Journalist Tells All,” because I do pride myself on being a strict hack, able to write fairly presentable stuff on almost any subject at a moment’s notice, and remembering Doctor Johnson’s bracing epigram that only a blockhead would write for any reason other than money, but I shied away from that title because I have already been accused in national review, by a certified California economist, of being a journalist, and there’s no need to add my two cents’ worth of agreement to his fulminating praise. I threw out the title because it seemed egotistical; I wanted the wind to blow toward the act of writing, not toward the writer.