Books in Brief: A Word or Two before You Go . . .

A Word or Two before You Go . . . by Jacques Barzun (Wesleyan, 191 pp., $14.95)

For well over fifty years Jacques Barzun has exercised an illuminative and antiseptic influence on American culture. A man of immense learning and urbanity, he is nevertheless full of that “common sense to an uncommon degree” which Coleridge thought was wisdom. Rather than content himself with being a Mandarin intellectual, Barzun has directed his energies by intentions at once intellectual, moral, and republican. Thus he has tilted against those false gods of a Godless age, far more jealously demanding than the One they deposed: art and science deified. A Word or Two before You Go .. cannot compare in importance to Barzun’s attacks on aestheticism and scientism (in The Use and Abuse of Art, Science: The Glorious Entertainment, and Darwin, Marx, and Wagner), but it is a book of real value, containing short essays on language written from the 1940s to the 1980s. The clear-eyed attentiveness to substance and communication is eloquent: “In spite of popular belief,” he writes, “it is possible to reason out matters of language [and it] is also important, because words point to ideas and suggest feelings, which together constitute ‘style’ in the sense of moral and intellectual fitness.” And again: “A language is not a mere device; it is a fund of embodied ideas. . . . Hence changes brought about by new forms and sounds in the web of its inner relations are as debatable as a piece of foreign policy or a bronze nude in a public square.” No bronze here, but all gold. The essay “A Copy Editor’s Anthology” follows on Bar zun’s widely read piece “Behind the Blue Pencil—Censorship or Creeping Creativity?” (1985) and should be read by every professional writer and by anyone else worried about the imperious and often ignorant re-writing done by copy editors—a particularly insidious and arrogant form of censorship. M. D. AESCHLIMAN

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).

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A Word or Two before You Go . . . by Jacques Barzun (Wesleyan, 191 pp., $14.95)

For well over fifty years Jacques Barzun has exercised an illuminative and antiseptic influence on American culture. A man of immense learning and urbanity, he is nevertheless full of that “common sense to an uncommon degree” which Coleridge thought was wisdom. Rather than content himself with being a Mandarin intellectual, Barzun has directed his energies by intentions at once intellectual, moral, and republican. Thus he has tilted against those false gods of a Godless age, far more jealously demanding than the One they deposed: art and science deified. A Word or Two before You Go .. cannot compare in importance to Barzun’s attacks on aestheticism and scientism (in The Use and Abuse of Art, Science: The Glorious Entertainment, and Darwin, Marx, and Wagner), but it is a book of real value, containing short essays on language written from the 1940s to the 1980s. The clear-eyed attentiveness to substance and communication is eloquent: “In spite of popular belief,” he writes, “it is possible to reason out matters of language [and it] is also important, because words point to ideas and suggest feelings, which together constitute ‘style’ in the sense of moral and intellectual fitness.” And again: “A language is not a mere device; it is a fund of embodied ideas. . . . Hence changes brought about by new forms and sounds in the web of its inner relations are as debatable as a piece of foreign policy or a bronze nude in a public square.” No bronze here, but all gold. The essay “A Copy Editor’s Anthology” follows on Bar zun’s widely read piece “Behind the Blue Pencil—Censorship or Creeping Creativity?” (1985) and should be read by every professional writer and by anyone else worried about the imperious and often ignorant re-writing done by copy editors—a particularly insidious and arrogant form of censorship. M. D. AESCHLIMAN

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).