Vanquishing Verbal Visigoths

For those inclined to view contemporary American culture as by now a hopeless case, the sudden freshet of books extolling the English language and excoriating its current brutal misuse should come as a decided encouragement. That such books are not only being written, but published, and selling briskly, can only be a source of universal rejoicing. Astonishingly, it seems now to matter that in recent years intelligible speech has been surreptitiously replaced by “meaningful communication,” and that the ability to commit a simple declarative sentence to paper has been regarded as “irrelevant” when “telling it like it is.”

Edwin Newman led the counterattack against the verbal Visigoths in his sharply observant and devastatingly witty book, Strictly Speaking. Newman, however, occupies himself for the most part with recording and ridiculing (in the hope of reform ) the ravages inflicted on the language by the ignorant and the unthinking. His is the justified complaint of the intellectually fastidious man concerned with the damage being done to the tools of thought that he is compelled to share with careless strangers.

RB

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Rene Kuhn Bryant

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For those inclined to view contemporary American culture as by now a hopeless case, the sudden freshet of books extolling the English language and excoriating its current brutal misuse should come as a decided encouragement. That such books are not only being written, but published, and selling briskly, can only be a source of universal rejoicing. Astonishingly, it seems now to matter that in recent years intelligible speech has been surreptitiously replaced by “meaningful communication,” and that the ability to commit a simple declarative sentence to paper has been regarded as “irrelevant” when “telling it like it is.”

Edwin Newman led the counterattack against the verbal Visigoths in his sharply observant and devastatingly witty book, Strictly Speaking. Newman, however, occupies himself for the most part with recording and ridiculing (in the hope of reform ) the ravages inflicted on the language by the ignorant and the unthinking. His is the justified complaint of the intellectually fastidious man concerned with the damage being done to the tools of thought that he is compelled to share with careless strangers.