James J. Kilpatrick - The Writers Art

The Writers Art copyright 1984 by Op Ed, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews. For information write Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, an Andrews McMeel Universal company, 1130 Walnut Street, Kansas City, Missouri 64106.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

www.andrewsmcmeel.com

Kilpatrick, James Jackson 1920
The writers art.

1. English languageErrors of usage. 2. English languageStyle. I. Title

PE1460.K54 1984 808.042 84-2892

E-ISBN: 978-1-4494-0561-8

Cover design by George Diggs

ATTENTION: SCHOOLS AND BUSINESSES
Andrews McMeel books are available at quantity discounts with bulk purchase for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail the Andrews McMeel Publishing Special Sales Department:

For
Heather, Douglas, Alina,
Charlotte Alyce, Maria,
Jamie, and Marc

Most people have heard the wisecrack about laws and sausages, how they resemble one another in what went into making them. Or something like that. James Jackson Kilpatrick warns against the clich, and it is never too soon to heed James Jackson Kilpatrick when he is laying down the law on English usage. In fact, sausages have it in common with much else. There isnt anything especially eye-catching about the rocky stones that in due course yielded the marble that in due course yielded the Parthenon. Those of us disinclined to biological curiosity experience no temptation to look at pictures of livers, upper intestines, or tonsils, let alone the real thing. And we all know about those many who having experienced grammar at school, and been made to parse sentences, and distinguish between dependent and independent clauses, subjunctive and indicative moods, have no more curiosity about the morphology of English than most of us have about the innards of a diesel engine. But now listen.

Spring is coming to Scrabble, Virginia. There is the profusion of flowers. Among them the trillium, loveliest of them all, which kneels as modestly as a spring bride, all in white, beside the altar of an old oak stump. If youre not familiar with the trillium, imagine the flower that would come from a flute if a flute could make a flower. That is the trillium, a work of God from a theme by Mozart.

I shouldnt really need, in order to make my point that prejudices about anatomical structures are not always warranted, to do much more than to say that the man who brought off those lovely sentencescasual commentary on a natural cycle in an earlier bookhas up and written an engrossing and majestic treatise on the English language. He calls it The Writers Art. It is not only the best book of its kind I have ever experienced (the incomparable Fowler wrote a different kind of a book), it is the most compelling reading about writing I have ever seen. If such a book were written about human biology, I would be tempted to become a doctor. But never mind if you have a vocation: James Jackson Kilpatricks book will be read for the sheer pleasure of the experience; read by people who intend to make no special effort to improve their writing, let alone harbor any ambition to write belletristically. But I warn that Mr. Kilpatricks book is so seductive that the temptation to improve is not easily resisted. It requires a chastity belt on the spirit to read, and not to experience temptation in the voluptuous delights of language.

It requires only a reading of a few paragraphs of the book to know that you are embarked on an important trip, under the direction of a guide who (most important) has labored intensively to understand what it is that works in English, what it is that does not work in English; moreover, a writer whose aptitude (indispensable) for words, and for the composition of sentences, is so marked that the distinctions he makes convince us in part because they hit with revelatory force, in part because we have come to trust him deeply. Kilpatrick engages at first attention; then respect; finally devotion. This last is done, I think, because he insinuates his own veneration for the proper sentence and, sensing now what it is that we may have been missing, we are grateful to the man (person?see ) who helped open our eyes.

Notice that JJK has named his book The Writers Art. It is art he speaks of in two senses. The first is that fine writinghe speaks of Rebecca West, for instance; Lawrence Durrell, Hemingway, and Twainis not something we can master in the sense that, say, we can master a word processor. But it is also true, where art is the object of our scrutiny, that differing judgments can be made. It required many centuries before the aesthetic consensus crystallized that Notre Dame de Chartres was possibly the most beautiful thirteenth-century cathedral in Europe and that Westminster Abbey was possibly the ugliest thirteenth-century cathedral in Europe. Some questions about English are unresolved (Its I or Its me?) And then, too, there is the matter of usage. Although the overwhelming majority of technicians may agree that a particular usage is offensive and should be quarantined, manacled, exportedmaybe even executed, if only the Supreme Court will go alongthat use will at some point overwhelm us, like old age. JJK is sensitive to the autonomous inertia of words and for that reason accepts the likes of access as a transitive verb. But his ear is so good, his good sense so gratifyingly reliable, that we find ourselves volunteers in the good usage army, disposed to spend blood, sweat, and tears.

Over the years I have been much interested, and frequently amused, by the authors Hundred Years War against Unusual Words. Interested because he makes his case so well; amused because he is not particularly constrained by it. He tells several amusing stories in this volume, one of them about stumbling into the word limicolous, which is to say, living in mud. He found himself using the word, and woke the next day with a most dreadful hangover. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept: When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away. My brother pundit, Bill Buckley, falls into sin even more easily than I. He has had affairs with decoctable, anfractuosity, and endogamous. He has taken to bed with chiliastic, phlogistonic, sciolism, incondite, and osmotically. He has fallen for hubristic, otiose, repristinate, adumbrated, and synecdoche. Two sentences later, the author uses in a dense little cluster, arcane, syntactically, and bibulousness. And this notwithstanding that there are those who believe that arcane is an arcane word, that syntactically can be made to sound like the malapropism of someone far gone in bibulousness.

I have a private theory about unusual words so simple it is embarrassing, in such august auspices, to disclose. It is as simple as that, say, we tend to conclude that people who use words with which we happen not to be familiar are using unfamiliar words. If John knows 8,000 words and Susan knows 8,000 words, inevitably John will know 250 words that Susan does not, and Susan will know 250 words that John does not, and John will think Susan exhibitionistic, and Susan will think John affected. I like to cite the waiter of a restaurant in Garden City who approached me twenty-five years ago to complain that he had subscribed to National Review and was absolutely certain that its circulation would greatly increase if only it stopped tolerating such unfamiliar words. Exactly two years later I was at the same restaurant, same table, same waiter, who greeted me joyfully, congratulating me on having taken his advice.