The word “insecurity,” by the way, seems to have been taken over by the psychiatrists as their personal property. In politics, as in penology, “security” itself has come to mean “insecurity.” Take, for example, this sentence: “He was considered a ‘maximum security’ prisoner because of his police record and was never allowed out of his cell block.” Similarly, “security data” means data of the kind calculated to scare the living daylights out of you, if not, indeed, your pants off. I could prove that “maximum,” in the case of the prisoner mentioned above, really means “minimum,” but I don’t want to get us in so deep that we can’t get out. The present confused usage of “security” may have originated with the ancient Romans. Anyway, here is what Cassell’s Latin Dictionary has to say about securitas: “I. freedom from care. A. In a good sense, peace of mind, quiet, Cic. B. In a bad sense, carelessness, indifference, Tac. II. Transf., freedom from danger, security, Tac.”
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A vital and restless breed of men, given to tapping our toes and drumming with our fingers, infatuated with every new crazy rhythm that rears its ugly beat, we have never truly loved harmony, the graceful structure of shapes and tones, and for this blindness and deafness we pay the awful price of continuous cacophony. It gets into language as well as music; we mug melody for the sake of sound effects, and the louder and more dissonant they are, the better we seem to like them. Our national veins have taken in the singing blood of Italy, Wales, Ireland, and Germany, but the transfusion has had no beneficial effect. Great big blocky words and phrases bumble off our tongues and presses every day. In four weeks of purposeful listening to the radio and reading the newspapers I have come up with a staggering list, full of sound and fury, dignifying nothing: “automation,” “roadability,” “humature,” “motivational cognition” (this baby turned up in a series of travel lectures and was never defined), “fractionalization,” “varietism,” “redesegregation,” “additive,” “concertization” (this means giving a concert in a hall, and is not to be confused with cinematization or televisionization). The colloquial deformity “knowledgeable,” which should have been clubbed to death years ago, when it first began crawling about like the late Lon Chaney, has gained new life in recent months. It is a dented derby of a word, often found in the scrawny company of such battered straw hats as “do-gooder,” “know-how,” “update,” “uptake” (I recently uptook the iodine uptake test for thyroidism), and others so ugly and strange I can’t decipher them in my notes. One of them looks like “de-egghead,” which would mean to disintellectualize or mentally emasculate—a crippling operation approved of by an alarming number of squash-heads, in Washington and elsewhere.
During my month of vigil and research, I heard an able physiologist who has a radio program say, quite simply, “We do not use up all the food we take in.” He wasn’t allowed to get away with that piece of clarity, however. “Ah,” cut in his announcer, for the benefit of those no longer able to understand simplicity, “the utilization factor!” I turned from this station to a droning psychologist, just in time to hear him say, “The female is sometimes the sexual aggressor.” Here a familiar noun of mental illness and military invasion was clumsily at work beating in the skull of love with a verbal bung-starter. The sweetheart now often wears the fustian of the sick man and the Caesar. In the evening, I tuned in on one of the space-patrol programs that gleefully exude the great big blockyisms. “Your astrogation bank will tell you!” cried the captain of a space ship to another interplanetary pilot, meaning his navigational instruments. In a fairy tale, an astrogation bank would be a “star panel,” but the quality of fairy tale is nowhere to be found in these dime novels of the constellations.
One Sunday morning, my head aching with “kiss-close” and “swivel-chair-it,” meaning, I guess, “at kissing distance” and “maul it over in your executive brain,” respectively, I stumbled upon a small radio station that had been captured by a man of God, ominous and squealful, who was begging his listeners to live on their knees, not as slaves but as supplicants. This particular fundamentalist, or maybe it is fundamentalitarian, had probably never heard of the great protest “I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.” But these yammering eschatologists, and many of their followers, have even less respect for the glory and grace of English than the unsaved politicians. “Let us cease to sugar-coat, let us cease to whitewash, let us cease to bargain-counter the Bible!” the speaker implored us. He finished second in vulgarity, I regret to say, to a reverend I had heard earlier in the year, who shouted, “I didn’t cook up this dish, God cooked it up. I’m just dishing it out to ye!” The line between holiness and blasphemy becomes even thinner when some of the lay testimonialists begin ranting. “I own a shoe store in New Jersey,” one of them confessed, “but Jesus Christ is my senior partner.”
A recent investigation of the worries and concerns of five thousand selected Americans revealed that we are preoccupied almost wholly with the personal and private, and are troubled only mildly by political anxieties, including the danger of war, the state of civil liberties, and the internal Communist threat. This does not come as a surprise to me, since the nature of our national concern about Communism is proved to be personal by such expressions as “anti-anti-Communists” and “anti-anti-anti-Communists.” The first actually means men who are against men who are against Communists, and the second, when you unravel it, means men who are against men who are against men who are against Communists. In these wonderful examples of our love of formidable elaborationisms, concept and doctrine are put aside, and personalities take their place. What we have left is pure personalism—a specific reactionary who is against a specific liberal who is against Senator McCarthy, let us say. The multiplicity of prefixes, another sign of linguistic poverty, was touched with a fine and healthful irony in Quincy Howe’s invention of the phrase “ex-ex-Communist.” (Many will claim that for their own, but Mr. Howe got to it first.) One would think that Americans would be worried, or at least concerned, by a man who may have ceased to be a man who may have ceased to be a Communist, but the Worry Research I have mentioned showed that this isn’t so. We are worried about health, family matters, and money, and we have no time for a man who may be lying about lying. Incidentally, a fairly new advertising slogan, “The portable portable,” fits neatly into modern jargon: the typewriter that you can carry that you can carry.
While I was exploring the decline of expression in America, I spent a week in a hospital. Medical science has done much for humanity, but not in the area of verbal communication. It should undergo a prefectomy, and have some of its prefixes taken out. I should like to see the “semi” removed from “semi-private,” a dispiriting word that originated in hospitals; there must be a less depressing way of describing a room with two or more beds. I am also for taking the “sub” out of “sub-clinical,” and starting all over again with the idea in mind of making the word mean something. Incidentally, I discovered at the hospital the difference between “to be hospitalized” and “to become hospitalized.” The first means to be placed in a hospital, and the second has two meanings: to get so that you can’t stand it in the hospital any longer, and to like it so much there that you don’t want to leave.
Lying in bed brooding over these matters, I turned on the radio and heard an American describe another American as “an old-time A.D.A. type of anti-Jeffersonian radical”—a beautiful specimen of bumblery. Sir Winston Churchill, in the exhilarating years of his public life, turned out many phrases as sharp as stilettos—for one example, “squalid gamin.” But you can count on your fingers the Americans, since the Thomas Paine of “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot,” who have added bright, clear phrases to our language. If you can bumble an opponent to death why stab him seems to be the general feeling among our politicians, some of whom have got through the ten years since the war ended with only five adjectives of derogation: naïve, hostile, unrealistic, complacent, and irresponsible. All these slither easily, if bo
ggily, into bumblery, and the bumbler is spared the tedious exercising of his mental faculties.
The day I got dressed and was about to leave the hospital, I heard a nurse and an interne discussing a patient who had got something in his eye. “It’s a bad city to get something in your eye in,” the nurse said. “Yes,” the interne agreed, “but there isn’t a better place to get something in your eye out in.” I rushed past them with my hair in my wild eyes, and left the hospital. It was high time, too.
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When and if I find a reputable psychosemanticist, I want to take up with him something that happened to me one night more than two years ago. It may be the basis of my etymological or philological problems, if that’s what they are—words, especially big ones, are beginning to lose their meaning for me. Anyway, I woke up one summer night, from a deep dream of peacelessness, only to realize that I had been startled by nothing whatever into a false sense of insecurity. I had a desperate feeling that I was being closed in on, that there was a menace in the woods behind my house or on the road in front of it, watchful, waiting, biding its time. A few weeks later I bought a .38-calibre Smith & Wesson police revolver, which startled my wife into a genuine sense of insecurity. She hid the gun somewhere, and the cartridges somewhere else, and I still don’t know where they are. I have often thought of telling my psychosemanticist about it, and I sometimes have the feeling that I did call on him and that the interview went like this:
“Doesn’t your wife’s hiding the gun worry you?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“It would me,” he confessed.
“It would what you?” I demanded.
It seemed to disturb him. “What would what me?” he asked cautiously.
I suddenly couldn’t think of a thing. I didn’t even know what what was, but I had to say something, so I said something: “Ill fares the land, to galloping fears a prey, where gobbledygook accumulates, and words decay.”
I had just reached that Goldsmith paraphrase when a sub-researcher brought me the news from Washington that a movement is afoot in the nation’s capital to cut down on bumblery, clarify officialese, and discourage certain platitudes (but not enough), in the wistful hope of bringing grace and meaning to the writing of English by government employees. I was glad to discover “finalize” among the banned gargoyles, but I don’t see how the lawyers in Washington are going to get along without “predecease.” The reformers, by the way, don’t seem to know that this monster spawned an equally clumsy offspring, “survivorship.” The main reason for this reform is to save filing space and money, but the economic aspect of the project does not depress me too much. It is a hopeful step in the direction of sense and sanity.
Come on, let’s go out and get a breath of fresh air.
FROM
Bernard Taper
MARCH 17, 1956 (ON AN NAACP ASSEMBLY)
HERE ARE FEW people in this country today, white or black, who have not become seriously concerned about the school-segregation controversy and the turmoil it has aroused. Like just about everyone else, I have been trying to understand, from stories I have read in the papers and from people I have talked with, what is happening and what is at stake. Early last month, on hearing that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was about to hold a regional meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, to assess the turbulent situation, I decided to ask permission to attend it, and I was very glad when, presently, my request was granted. I did not, of course, expect to come back from the meeting with the whole story of race relations in the South. Necessarily, what I heard and saw down there would be one-sided. Even so, the N.A.A.C.P. is the organization that had the most to do, directly, with starting all this; its staff pressed cases involving segregation through the inevitable years of litigation, and argued them before the Supreme Court, and won. What I wanted to find out at first hand was how some of its leaders were taking their victory and what they would make of it. This was to be the first Southern regional meeting since the impact of the United States Supreme Court’s order of last May requiring local school boards to desegregate had made itself widely felt. A great deal had happened since then.
My travelling companion on the flight to Atlanta, I was pleased to learn, would be Thurgood Marshall, the N.A.A.C.P.’s Special Counsel and the man who pleaded the segregation cases before the Supreme Court. He is a tall, vigorous man of forty-seven, with a long face, a long, hooked nose above a black mustache, and heavy-lidded but very watchful eyes. He is about as swarthy as a Sikh, and, in fact, rather resembles one when he is in a fierce mood. His mother is a retired schoolteacher; his father, who died eight years ago, was a waiter in Baltimore. In the last fifteen years, Marshall has attained the stature of a semi-legendary folk hero among his people. At the same time, he has earned the deepest respect of sophisticated jurists and students of the law. Since 1938, as the N.A.A.C.P. Special Counsel, he has appeared before the United States Supreme Court to argue sixteen cases. He has won fourteen of them. This would be an extraordinarily high record under any circumstances, but in the light of the fact that in each case Marshall was appealing a lower court’s decision, which lawyers consider a much tougher proposition than defending one, and, moreover, was seeking to persuade the highest court in the land to upset established precedent, it may be a unique record. The undisputed dean of constitutional lawyers in our time was the late John W. Davis, once a Democratic Presidential nominee, but the only occasion on which he and Marshall argued on opposite sides before the Supreme Court, Marshall won. That was in connection with the five school-segregation cases on which the court based its momentous ruling. It is as the result of Marshall’s victories before the United States Supreme Court that Negroes have won the right to vote in primaries in the South, the right to be free from Jim Crow restrictions when travelling from one state to another, and, now, the right to attend public schools without suffering segregation on the basis of race. Few living individuals have had a greater effect than Marshall on the social fabric of America. Not a scholarly or academic lawyer himself, he has been given credit for assembling a scholarly, painstaking staff and for knowing how to use their research and ideas creatively. No one denies that he is eloquent. He has made his most telling arguments when he has taken off from dry questions of legal precedent to range over the human and social implications of the matter at hand. Out of court, he is informal, colloquial and pungent in his speech, occasionally moody and brusque, sometimes stormy, and often playful, even at serious moments, but without violating his sense of the seriousness of the moment. His courtroom manner is quite different. At such times, his vivid personality does not become muted, but it does become transmuted. In court, he is deferential, respectful, and of a most imposing dignity. His associates say that this alteration of demeanor is not studied but, rather, stems from a profound, almost religious, respect for the law.
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The meeting was to take place on Saturday, February 18th. Marshall and I were to leave New York Friday afternoon. It snowed all that morning. When I set out for LaGuardia Airport to make a four-thirty-five plane, the sky was bleak. Icicles hung from the grilles of parked cars. The snow, already sooty and impure, lingered on the tops of cabs, on the fenders and running boards of trucks, and on the heaps of upturned earth and broken asphalt beside street excavations, around which the clogged traffic flowed sullenly. The pavements were wet, the gutters full of slush. In Queens, as the airport bus rushed along the highway, a freezing rain began to fall, turning to ice under our tires. It was nasty Northern weather. Lots of people were going South that weekend, the clerk who checked my ticket at the airline’s counter at LaGuardia told me, and he didn’t blame them a bit.
I found Marshall waiting in the plane. Wearing a double-breasted blue suit, he was slouched in his seat, his long legs crossed. I took off my hat and coat and sat down beside him. There was a brief delay while the wings were deiced, and then the plane taxied out onto the field, paused, and roared down the runway. Duri
ng the takeoff, Marshall sat hunched at the window, gazing with concentration into the heavily overcast sky, as if contributing his will power to the effort to get us off the ground. After the plane was well in the air, he slumped back like a man who had done his part and was now entitled to relax, unfastened his safety belt, lit a cigarette, put on horn-rimmed glasses, and settled down to reading the New York Post. He went through it page by page, picking up the continued stories as he came to them. When he had finished, he offered the Post to me and took up the World-Telegram, remarking, “Now let’s see what the other side has to say.” He went through that paper in the same way, impartially devoting as much attention to its pages, including the comics, as he had to the Post’s. The tumult over segregation in the South loomed up from both newspapers. Stories and editorials talked of racial strife, of violence and threats of violence. Marshall lit another cigarette. “One thing troubles me about this meeting ahead,” he said. “We won’t be able to smoke. That’s gonna hurt. The meeting’ll be at a Baptist church. The planning committee got together with Reverend Borders a while back, and he said, ‘I won’t mind if you smoke.’ We all looked real happy. And then he said, ‘But God will mind—and it’s His house.’ You should’ve seen our faces fall. We were sad.” The recollection of his gloom, and the telling of it, made Marshall quite merry for a moment.
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