Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1913-06-25
Literary Jarqon.

city Of King. Edward VII. professor of
English literature, lectnred at Cam
bridge recently upon .Jargon." jar
gon,9 he said, Was prose which was
not prose. 1t should not he confused
with what was called journalese The
tive overlapped indeed, aud each has Il
knack of assimilatins the others vi
ces, says the New York Sun. Sd.
But jargon found most of its par
tisans among good people who had
never written To or for. a newspaper in
their lives, who would never talk of
adverse climatic conditions when
they meant bad weather. who had
never trit1ed with words such as .eb-
sess.' ,reerudesee." ..enyisage .tad-
Iumbrate,'',. or with phrases such as
the psychological moment" the true
.nWardness, it gives furiously to
think" It dallied with Latinity-"de
die in diem.'' "eui BONO" but not for
the sake of style.
The journalist at the worst was an
artist in his way: he dabbed paint of
this kind upon the lily with profess
sional zeal. The more fragrant Cor, to
use his own word, arresting) the pig
ment the happier was his soul. Like
the Babu, he was trying all the while
to make our poor dear language more
ioriferous, more poetical; like the
Babu. for example, who, reporting his
mothers death, wrote:
Regret to inform YOU hand that
rocked the cradle has kicked the
bucket"
No such gusto marked, no such zeal,
artistic or professional, animated the
practitioners of jargon. caution was
| it's parent the instinct to save every
| thing, and especially trouble. They
might say it was bred by caution out
| of laziness 1t was becoming the Ian
guage of Parliament: it had become
| the medium through which boards OF
| Government, county councils, syndi-
Gates, committees and commercial
firms expressed the processes as wei
as the conclusions of their thought
and, i'm short, voiced the reason oil
their being.
| Some men were constitutionally in
capable of saying mo" The Minister
of the House of Commons conveyed II
thus: ",rhe answer to the question il
| in the negative That meant mo.
1t was iargon. and it happened to be-
accurate, but as a rule jargon was by
ne means accurate, lis method beint
to walk circumspectly around its tar
get. Thus the clerk of the Board q
IGuar6ians would minute that:
I'm the case of John jenkins. deceas
ed, the coffin provided was of the usu
al character and in accordance Will
specification at per Messrs So-and
Sos tender
Now this was not accurate. In thu
lease of John Jenkins"-But John Jen
lkins never had more than one case
land that was the coffin. The cieri
lsaid he had two. a coffin in a case.
There were two main vices OF jar
Igon. The first was that it used CIR
lcumlocution rather than short. straish
lspeech, and the second was that 1t ma
Mutually chose vague, wooliy apstrac
nouns rather than concrete ones. !
they would write masculine Engns
llet them never forget the old tag 0
their Latin grammar:
masculine will only be
, Things that you can touch and see.
AS his lectures were meant to be
: course in first aid" to writing, Pro
! fessor CUTLER Couch said he Woul
: suggest one or two extremely roug
e rules. First, whenever in their reao
!. ing they came across one or III
:. words, Cease, instance, character ma
S ture, condition, persuasion, degree
: whenever in their writing their pc
e slipped into one of them let them pu
:. themselves up and take thought.
e Next, having trained themselves
: keep lookout for these worst offehe
= ers. let them proceed to push their sus
s picions out among the whole ciouo
d host of abstract terms.
i How excellent a thing is sleep
lsighed Sancho PanZa; ut wraps ma
), round like cloak
el A jargoner would have said that:
vi among the beneficial quahtles
It sleep. the human consciousness frol
e the contemplation Of immediate CT
.e cumstances may, perhaps. be accoun
$. ed not the least remarkable.
e, Another trick of jargon was the trie
" Of elegant variation, so rampant In u
It sporting press: Hayward ana =.
If Fry now faced in bowling. which al
1t parently had no terrors for the sure