Evening star., 1938-01-23
SINCLAIR LEWIS EATS CROW
New Book Example Feeling Public Pulse Before Been
Formally Registered-Revot Against "Isms" He Once
Ilumined-Tyranny of Words Revealed.

| filed away. After the great Mississip-
pi floods. however. some scraps Of their
knowledge leaked into public print:
the better read began to take nots
Of deforestAtion and erosion. Since
the New Deal, conservation has be-
come political issue, and Tom, Dick
and Harry have all heard about it,
Mr.. Chase then leaped into the breach
and gave them the full informa ton.
It Is, OF course, not really his fault
If Tom. Dick and Harry, In their usual
muddle-headed fashion, decided that 1t
was Mr.. Chase who made the original
discovery that the Nations wealth is
being dissipated. It is not his fault,
either. If the painstaking reports and
prophecies Of the engineers remain
moldering unacknowledsed in their
dust in ofiicial archives. Not at all.
The instance is quoted simply as IN
example Of the way In which q re-
former writer proceeds In his profes.
sion today.
To earn q living In such q manner
requires Of course that the worker
have very active mind. He must be
constantly looking the field over and
he must pick few losers; II he does,
his reputation promptly suffers, and
buyers stop asking for his books. And
at the present moment 1t would seem
to the reviewer Mr.. Chase has got q
very poor chance. For once in his
career he seems to have slipped. He
is writing now about reform, of course,
but hardly about reform which will
interest many book purchasers. He
proposes nothing less than that we
reform our speech habits. The lam
guage Of common communication, he
has discovered, is distressingly likely
to lead to misunderstanding.
More particularly is this 50, he says,
in the field in which he has his own
major interest-the field Of social and
economic reform. He has been labor
ing for years. he tells us, to bring
certain salutary changes about in this
field. and now he finds out that the
terms which social and economic re-
formers Use have little meaning ex-
cept to themselves and, for that mat
ter, differ considerably from reformer
to reformer. This confusion does not
hold, he notes. in the professional
language Of scientists and mathe-
maticians. Therefore, let there be
professional language set up for social
and economic reformers, too. Let them
tas it were) clarity their meanings
Well, Mr.. Chase, you let them. The
reviewer does not know of a soul In
the world who would object, except
the aforementioned reformers them
selves. If you can induce your breth-
rem to write intelligibly, she, as one
who has expended invaluable eyesight
over the solemn, turgid meaningless
of their printed works during these
past months. will move that you
be immortalized in the Nations hall
Of fame. But it looks to her like q
fairly large it,
Mr.. Chase admits that he is not the
first to write on the contradictions
common to efforts at communicating
abstract ideas. He has found, he says,
that pioneers in the field before him
ttaking the place Of the engineers on
conservation) have already formulated
a science of exact speech and even
given 1t name. 1t is called "seman-
tics" Its purpose is to reduce the
communication of ideas to the per-
feet precision of the mathematical
equation. And the rest of his book
is given over to describing various
ways in which 1t works. or naming
ways in which it does not work. It
has nothing to do with formal logic,
he assures us. It bears a greater
Likeness to mathematics than to any
other existing body Of knowledge.
And it is for the Use Of sociologists,
economists and politicians! It Is to
displace the present manner of ora
tory. If you please. The public is to
become perfect in it and then. when
visited with streams of bombast, is to
inquire politely of speaker Or writer,
Yes, but what are you talking
about?" Thus semantics as formu-
lated by certain laboratory pioneers
and. even as soil erosion. popularized
by Stuart Chase The reviewer can
only reiterate that she fears that the
subject will not soon become a very
common one.
And if it did? What then? The
class Of 1910 would have ma jored, not
in sociology and economics, but in the
business Of teaching the public to
talk. It would be loosed on the land
as full Of bright new ideas As ever
was the class Of 1910. It would amuse
the intelligent, irritate the politicians
and weary the resigned. It might
displace the sociologists and econo-
mists. But they displaced somebody
in their turn. What Of it?
To the reviewer the answer to the
crude question would seem to be,
Nothing. except that Stuart Chase
has written one more book" And
she. for her own part. although una
ware of the research done by Mr..
Chase's pioneers, did not have to wait
for this book in order to know that
would-be leaders of the people talk
and write with something less than
PSAASSV PACI4oAOIl. 0llC 1OullU LIlC
same observation once in . novel by
Charles Dickens; she has come upon
it. too, in certain works by Anatole
France and Samuel Clemens. And
helas!-she has been reading the
books and magazine articles Of these
would-be leaders Gncluding those Of
Mr.. Stuart Chase herself these past
months. If you want real feeling on
the subject, ask book reviewer.
"Semantics, indeed" such Q one Is
likely to reply. "The language Is all
right. It is clear enough. Let sociolo-
gists and economists clear their
heads" Book reviewers, OF course, are
notoriously disagreeable persons.
BEYOND HORIZONS. By Lincoln
Ellsworth. Garden City: Double
day Doran d Co.
THIS Is the autobiography Of the
famous polar explorer. the man
who has found less to hold him In
the well-warmed places OF the earth
than in itS frozen extremitieS. It