Typist

“ They get down millions of words a minute. But when they have got the job apparently done, they simmer away to nothing. They perform mysterious rites with ink-eraser. They scratch feebly with knives. They hold up to the light, they tittivate, they muse and they adorn. It is not the slightest use intimating that you do not care twopence whether there are typographic errors or not—the expert typist treats you with the scorn that the expert always does treat the layman with. At such junctures it is an advantage if the typist happens to be a he, because you can tell him what you think of him. ”

“ When you learn that God gave you ten fingers, not two, you may make a typist. And there is nothing more worth while than being able to express yourself in English. They'll teach you that on a newspaper. ”

“ The Englishman dictates his answers, not to a typewriter, but to a typist; a typewriter is merely the machine. If he desires the recipient to call him by telephone he doesn’t say, “ ’phone me at a quarter of eight,” but “ring me up at a quarter to eight.” And when the call comes he says “are you there? ”

“ Elk took up one of the slips on which the messages were written, and held it to the light.
“Watermark Three Lion Bond,” he read. “Typewriter new, written by somebody who was taught and has a weak little finger of the left hand—the ‘q’ and ‘a’ are faint. That shows he’s a touch typist—uses the same finger every time. Self-taught typists seldom use their little fingers. ”

“ What has all this to do with the formation of the English language or with the first conditions and necessary foundation of speech itself? Is there nothing beyond the reach of prejudice and party-spirit? It seems in this, as in so many other instances, as if there was a patent for absurdity in the natural bias of the human mind, and that folly should be stereotyped! ”

“ A prime office of this guardianship is to take care lest language fall into loose ways; for words being the final elements into which all speech resolves itself, if they grow weak by negligence or abuse, speech loses its firmness, veracity, and expressiveness. Style may be likened to a close Tyrian garment woven by poets and thinkers out of words and phrases for the clothing and adornment of the mind; and the strength and fineness of the tissue, together with its beauties of color, depend on the purity and precision, the transparency and directness of its threads, which are words. ”

“ Language therefore illustrates well all the great changes of folkways under the heads of coöperation and antagonism. We have an excellent chance to study the operation in the case of slang. A people who are prosperous and happy, optimistic and progressive, will produce much slang. It is a case of play. They amuse themselves with the language. We may think the new words and phrases vulgar and in bad taste, or senseless and ridiculous. We may reject them, but the masses will decide whether they shall be permanently rejected or not. ”

“ In assuming the existence of comparable types, therefore, we are not gainsaying the individuality of all historical processes; we are merely affirming that back of the face of history are powerful drifts that move language, like other social products, to balanced patterns, in other words, to types. ”

“ The "respectable" classes are apt to rob language of its savor, clipping and trimming it like the trees in a Dutch garden. You must go to the common, unrespectable classes for racy vigor of tongue. They avoid circumlocutions, eschew diffuseness, go straight to the point, and prefer concrete to abstract expressions. ”

“ If any man were to ask me, which would be supposed to be a perfect style, or language, I would answer, that in which a man speaking to five hundred people, of all common and various capacities, idiots or lunatics excepted, should be understood by them all in the same manner with one another, and in the same sense which the speaker intended to be understood—this would certainly be a most perfect style. ”

“ All the way along there has been a decided blank space between decision in the mind and embodiment in language.
Whether slang, profanity, or colloquialisms have cut into our ordinary speech to such an extent as to keep us at a loss for the apt word, or whether we have grown careless or slovenly in our habits of expression, is a matter with which we are not concerned here. We do know that we are continually hampered by our inability to state absolutely our meaning. ”

“ The lower, middle, and upper classes have each a different mode of expression, and the women of each class use a still simpler version. He who learns the court language cannot make himself understood by shop-keepers or servants. He who has acquired coolie-talk insults a gentleman by uttering its common words and inelegant expressions in his presence. ”

“ The power of the printed word has always been tremendous; the authority of type is often excessive and unjustified; yet this only makes more exacting the inevitable standard of truth. Style will forever be challenged by truth, that austere higher critic whose method is so searching and whose judgments are so inexorable. ”

“ Many persons look alike and many type-faces look alike, until we get to know them intimately and are able to distinguish their characteristics. The average man or woman is unable to identify Caslon Oldstyle, Scotch Roman, Bodoni Modern, or any specific letter used in printing, altho there are those who have a vague idea of the existence of types known as “old-style” or “modern.” ”

“ He has changed his language with his dress, and instead of endeavouring at purity or propriety, has no other care than to catch the reigning phrase and current exclamation, till, by copying whatever is peculiar in the talk of all those whose birth or fortune entitles them to imitation, he has collected every fashionable barbarism of the present winter, and speaks a dialect not to be understood among those who form their style by poring upon authors. ”

“ But be this as it may, it suffices simply to observe, how many of the words current among barbarous peoples are like the sounds appertaining to the things signified; how many of our own oldest and simplest words have the same peculiarity; how children habitually invent imitative words; and how the sign-language spontaneously formed by deaf mutes is based on imitative actions—to be convinced that the notion of likeness is that from which the nomenclature of objects takes its rise. ”

“ It is a venerable custom to knit up the speculative consideration of any subject with the counsels of practical wisdom. The words of this essay have been vain indeed if the idea that style may be imparted by tuition has eluded them, and survived. There is a useful art of Grammar, which takes for its province the right and the wrong in speech. Style deals only with what is permissible to all, and even revokes, on occasion, the rigid laws of Grammar or countenances offences against them. ”

“ The color of the rule border contrasts with the white of the background and the black of the illustration. The gray effect of the type group is a harmonizing factor that softens the contrasts. Only one face of type—Cloister Oldstyle—is used, and that of a size that makes it possible for the business man to read the message as he blots his 133signature. The treatment is masculine and will please a great many because of its style. ”

“ To be able to repeat conventionalities—bringing them in at the telling moment, adjusting phrases to emergencies, as a joiner adapts the pieces of wood to his carpentry—may be, and is, a very neat and a very dexterous performance, but it is scarcely the exercise to which a large capacity will address itself. Imitation must be, in one sense or other, the stronghold of the linguist—imitation of expression, of style, of accent, of cadence, of tone. The linguist must not merely master grammar, but he must manage gutturals. ”

“ Let us next notice that the recognition of likeness and unlikeness, which underlies classification, and out of which continued classification evolves the idea of complete likeness—let us next notice that it also underlies the process of naming, and by consequence language. For all language consists, at the beginning, of symbols which are as like to the things symbolised as it is practicable to make them. The language of signs is a means of conveying ideas by mimicking the actions or peculiarities of the things referred to. ”

“ In France, for instance, careful consideration is given to the teaching of a correct use of words not only but to the development of taste and style in discourse. From the notion, or one similar, that a rich man may dress like a slovenly pauper, many of our college men take ugly liberties with their mother-tongue. ”

“ Would we learn the true history of a modern language, we must not apply to the Critics, who only press for conformity and appeal to precedents; but we must look to those other more practical dealers in words, the Lexicographers, who at once reveal to us all the incomings and outgoings of their great “exchequer of words.” Turn over the prefaces of our elder lexicographers. Every one of them pretends to prune away the vocabulary of his predecessors, and to supply, in this mortality of words, those which live on the lips of contemporaries. ”

“ Regardless of our vocations-working in a large corporation or heading one's own business, farming, creating art, teaching language or mathematics, programming, or even participating in a university's board of trustees- we accept, even if with some reluctance, the rationalization of language. Our lives take place increasingly in the impersonal world of stereotype discourse of forms, applications, passwords, and word processed letters. ”

“ Humbler people yielded through fear of offence; and the practice extended, in time, to all ranks of society: so that at present the customary mode of familiar as well as complimentary address, is altogether plural; both the verb and the pronoun being used in that form. [237] This practice, which confounds one of the most important distinctions of the language, affords a striking instance of the power of fashion. It has made propriety itself seem improper. But shall it be allowed, in the present state of things, to confound our conjugations and overturn our grammar? ”

“ It is one of the forms in which we naturally give expression to our tastes, our constructive faculties, our reason, our feelings, our habits—in a word, to our character, as a whole. This expression is often greatly modified by the arbitrary laws of Fashion, and by circumstances of time, place, and condition, which we can not wholly control; but can hardly be entirely falsified. Even that arch tyrant, the reigning Mode, whatever it may be, leaves us little room for choice in materials, forms, and colors, and the choice we make indicates our prominent traits of character. ”

“ The language, too, of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appears to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. ”

“ But when we have inveighed as much as we need against the dangers of classification, we must swing round to the first statement that for unifying the character and giving it fundamental significance such classification is of great importance.
Merely to find the type to which a character belongs is not sufficient; such a process leaves the character stamped, to be sure, but without interest. We care for living people not chiefly because of their type but because of their individuality, the little traits that set them apart from their fellows. ”

“ If then we find upon examination that this difficult undertaking, requiring the union of talents the most opposite, of unwearying application, delicate discrimination, refined taste, practical skill in composition, and an absolute command over a stubborn and inflexible dialect, has been executed with consummate ability, we have no right to complain that many of the topics are handled somewhat superficially, that there is an absence of all originality of thought, and that no effort is made to enlarge the boundaries of the science. ”

“ It is characteristic of the interest which science is now taking in things formerly deemed unworthy of consideration that philologists no longer speak of slang in contemptuous terms. Perhaps, indeed, it was not the scholar, but the amateur philologist, the mere literary man, who affected to despise slang. To the trained investigator into the mutations of language and into the transformations of the vocabulary, no word is too humble for respectful consideration; and it is from the lowly, often, that the most valuable lessons are learned. ”

“ On the other hand, it is the fashion among the higher classes, by way of distinguishing themselves from the ‘plebs,’ to use the most vulgar language and expressions, and carefully to conceal any knowledge that goes beyond reading and writing. ”

“ There is also the lower level used by the least intellectual, frequently incorrect according to the laws of the language, rough, containing what we now call "slang," the talk of a knot of men on the street corner waiting for a new bulletin of a ball game, cheap in words, impoverished in synonyms, using one word to express any number of ideas, as slang always does. Those two levels are really farther apart than we are apt to realize. A book or an article on the upper level will be uninteresting and unintelligible to the people on the lower level. ”

“ I highly disapprove of the absurd practice, so common with young men of the present day, of expressing their ideas in that low and incomprehensible dialect, termed 'slang,' which, in my opinion, has neither wit nor refinement to redeem its vulgarity, and which effectually prevents their acquiring that easy yet dignified mode of expression which should characterise the conversation of the true gentleman. ”