Death

Herewith a number of lyric verse quotations about death or dying from books in my collection. Where the source is formal, rhyming verse, I tend to include the original; where it is prose or free verse, I tend to limit myself to a mere English translation.  Except in a couple of cases, I provide the entire poem. I do not believe that these lyrics seriously facilitate our demise, but they may offer old-timers some sense of what is ahead. I will also try to assess the value of individual quotations.

In the foreword to a collection of Robert Graves’s poems, which I no longer own, Graves asserted that there were mainly (or only--I quote from imperfect memory) two subjects, love and death, fully appropriate for verse, though, needless to say, he touched on other subjects much of the time. I start with what I consider two of his best poems on the subject.

The Suicide in the Copse

The suicide, far from content,

Stared down at his own shattered skull.

Was this what he meant?

Had not his purpose been

To liberate himself from duns and dolts

By a change of scene?

From somewhere came a roll of laughter.

He had looked so on his wedding-day,

And the day after.

There was nowhere at all to go,

And no diversion now but to peruse

What literature the winds might blow

Into the copse where his body lay:

A year-old sheet of sporting news,

A crumpled schoolboy essay.

And now a poem for a more universal form of demise.

The Villagers and Death

The Rector’s pallid neighbour at The Firs,

Death, did not flurry the parishioners.

Yet from a weight of superstitious fears,

Each tried to lengthen his term of years;

He was congratulated who combined

Toughness of flesh with weakness of the mind

In consequential rosiness of face.

The dull and not ill-mannered populace

Pulled off their caps to Death, as they slouched by,

But rumoured him both atheist and spy.

All vowed to outlast him (though none ever did)

And hear the earth drum on his coffin-lid.

Their groans and whispers down the village street

Soon soured his nature, which was never sweet.

Clearly Graves did not have use for suicide and presumably scorned the general fear and reprehension of death, though this by no means meant atheism as the only solution.

Now let us start our survey of death poetry through the ages as I can find it on my bookshelves. We begin at the Renaissance in Italy with Gaspara Stampa

(1523-54), a wonderful scholar and poet who lived mostly in Venice. She was the member of at least one academy, a student of Greek and Latin, and corresponded with most of the eminent men of her time. Her sonnets are the record of an unhappy love affair; herewith one of them.

Cui mi dara socorso a l’ora estrema.

   Che verra  morte trarmi fuor di vita

   Tosto dopo, l’acerba dispartita

   Onde fin d’ora il cor paventa e trema?

Madre e sorella no; perche la tema

     Questa e quella a dolersi meco invita;

      E poi per prova omaicla loro aita

       Non giova a questa doglia alta e suprema.

E le vostre fidate amiche scorte’

       Che di giovarmi avriano sole il come,

      Saran lontane in quell’ altera corte.

Dunque io porro queste terrene some

       Senza conforto alcun, se non di morte

       Sospirando e chiamando il vostro nome.

As Richard Aldington translates: “Who shall succour me in my extremest hour/ when death is tearing me from life, ah!/ bitter parting!! whereat the heart doth trmble and fear,/ Mother and sister, no; because fear urges both/ to grieve with me; and at that time to accept their help does not avail this last and lofty woe./ And then your faithful, kindly guidance that alone knew how to help me/ will be far away in that so lofty Court. / So I shall lay aside these earthly burdens/ with naught to comfort me except at death/ the sighing and the calling on your name!”

                                                                                                                                                           Next we skip to 1950, when the poet and fiction writer Cesare Pavese, unhappily in love with the American actress Constance Dowling (sister of the more famous Doris), committed suicide. A sequence of ten poems, eight in Italian and two in English, were found in a folder upon his death. Most famously the following, in short, unrhyming verses, beginning “Death will come and will have your eyes,” and ending with “For each man Death has a look he knows./ Death will come and will have your eyes./ It will be like giving up a vice,/ like seeing in a glass/ a dead face reappearing/ like listening to closed lips./ Dumb we shall descend into the abyss.”

We move now to French, speclfically  to a poem by the Belgian quasi-surrealist Henri Michaux, who lived from 1899 to 1984, and often changed allegiances and styles. I don’t know from what date the poem translated by Anthony Hartley is, but here goes. “Nausea or Is It Death Coming On”.

Surrender, my heart. We have struggled enough. And let my life stop. We have not been cowards, we have done what we could.

Oh! my soul, you go or you stay; you must decide. Do not finger my organs in that way, sometimes attentively, sometimes distractedly. You go or stay, you must decide. I myself can bear it no longer.

Lords of death, I have never blasphemed against you nor applauded you. Have pity on me, already the traveler of so many journeys, without a suitcase, without a master either. Without wealth, and the fame went elsewhere; you are powerful assuredly and comical above all, have pity on the crazy man who already shouts his name to you before crossing the barrier; catch him on the wing, let him accustom himself, if it can be done, to your temperaments and your habits, and if it please you to help him, help him, help him, I beg you.

Or take this poem by the Uruguay-born French poet and prose writer Jules Supervielle (1884-1960), irregularly rhymed but printed as verse, and entitled “For a Dead Poet.” I translate:

Quickly give him an ant

And however little it may be,

But let it well be his!

One must not cheat on a dead man.

Give it to him, or the beak of a swallow,

A bit of grass, a bit of Paris,

He has no more than a great void to himself

And still understands only poorly his fate.

To choose from

All this, he gives you in exchange

Darker presents that the hand cannot grasp:

A reflection lying under the snow,

Or the reverse of the highest of clouds,

The silence in the middle of the din,

Or the star that nothing protects.

All this he names and bestows,

He who is without a dog or anyone.

I don’t know the exact date of the poem, but it must be from his rejected surrealist period.

Let us now move to Germany, where we

start with a poem by Detlev von Liliencron (1844-1909) whose name alone is almost a poem. The piece is “Tod auf Aehren” (Death in the Corn). Note that lacking  diaresis,I use the alternate added E after a vowel.

Im Weizenfeld, in Korn und Mohn,

Liegt ein Soldat unaufgefunden.

Zwei Tage schon,  zwei Naechte schon.

Mit schweren Wunden, unverbunden.

Durst ueberquaelt und fieberwild.

Im Todeskampf den Kopf erhoben.

Ein letzter Traum, ein letztes Bild,

Sein brechend Auge schlaegt nach oben.

Die Sense sirrt im Aehrenfeld,

Er sieht sein Dorf im Arbeitsfrieden.

Ade, ade du Heimatswelt—

Und beugt das Haupt und ist verschieden.

In the wheatfield, in corn and poppies,/ Lies a soldier undiscovered./ Two days already, two nights already./ With heavy wounds unbandaged.// Overtortured by thirst and wild with fever,/ With lifted head in death struggle./ A final dream, a final image/ His breaking eye projects upward. // The scythe hisses in the wheat field,/ He sees his village in the Sunday rest./ Farewell, farewell, my home world--/ And bows his head and has departed.

Now for a poem by the wonderful poet and prose writer Theodor Storm (1817-88), I believe about his deceased wife, “Einer Toten” (To a Dead Lady):

Das aber kann ich nicht ertragen,

Dass so wie sonst die Sonne lacht;

Dass wie in deinen Lebenstagen

Die Uhren gehn, die Glocken schlagen,

Einfoerming wechseln Tag und Nacht;

Dass wenn des Tages Lichter schwanden,

Wie sonst der Abend uns vereint;

Und dass, wo sonst dein Stuhl gestanden,

Schon andre ihre Plaetze fanden,

Und nichts dich zu vermissen scheint;

Indessen von den Gitterstaeben

Die Mondesstreifen schmal und karg

In deine Gruft hinunterweben,

Und mit gespenstig truebem Leben

Hinwandeln ueber deinen Sarg.

That, however, I cannot bear/ That the sun laughs as usual./ That as in your living days,/ The clocks go and the bells ring/ Unchangedly alternating day and night;// That when the lights of day vaned,/ Evening as usual  united us;/ And that where as usual your chair stood,/ Others already found their places,/ And nothing seemed to be missing you;// Meanwhile between the fence staves, narrow and stingy,/ The moon stripes weave their way down/ With ghostly and murky life into your vault,/ To  wander on across your coffin.

Here the translation cannot render German’s ability to turn words like moon and stripes into compounds, which somehow objectifies them. Still the deep melancholy prevails.

And now we come to the somewhat longer section of Anglophone poetry. I skip the most obvious, Dylan Thomas’s villanelle for his dying father, as too well known, but I include this almost as well-known poem by Walter Savage Landor, “Rose Aylmer.”

Ah what avails the sceptred race!

   Ah what the form divine!

What every virtue, every grace!

  Rose Aylmer, all were thine.

Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

    May weep, but never see,

A night of memories and sighs

     I consecrate to thee.

And herewith a more modern kind of dirge by  Edna St. Vincent Millay.           

If I should learn in some quite casual way

That you were gone, not to return again—

Read from the back page of some paper, say,

Held by a neighbor in a subway train,

How at the corner of this avenue

And such a street (so are the papers filled)

A hurrying man who happened to be you,

At noon today had happened to be killed—

I should not cry aloud—I could not cry

Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place—

I should but watch the station lights rush by

With a more careful interest on my face;

Or raise my eyes and read with greater care

Where to store furs or how to treat the hair.

And now this, “Here Lies a Lady,” from John Crowe Ransom, more explicit and detailed than most.

Here lies a lady of beauty and high degree,

Of chills and fever she died, of fever and chills

The delight of her husband,  her aunts, an infant of three,

And of medicos marvelling sweetly on her ills.

For either she burned, and her confident eyes would blaze,

And her fingers fly in a manner to puzzle their heads—

What was she making? Why, nothing, she sat in a maze

Of old scraps of laces, snipped into curious shreds—

Or this would pass, and the light of her fire decline

Till she lay discouraged and cold as a thin stalk white and blown,

And would not open her eyes to kisses, to wine;

The sixth of these states was her last; the cold settled down.

Sweet ladies, long may ye bloom, and toughly I hope ye may thole,

But was she not lucky? In flowers and lace and mourning,

In love and great honour we bade God rest her soul;

After six little spaces of chill. And six of burning.”

Why, you may wonder, the archaisms and Britishisms? This, I suppose, is Ransom’s way of making the poem more universal and timeless. Also a good way to end a mini survey.

What are we to conclude? That dying affects, in poetry, women more pathetically than men, who make mourning , however, as touching as women do? That there can be a kind of death in life, as in the Michaux poem? Or that death can be dealt best with fasntasies about it? Notice that none of the poets believes in an afterlife. That both some men and some women can endure a loved one’s demise with a certain amount of restraint, of stoicism?  That many more poems are needed for more than very tentative conclusions? That unlike by the moribund, too absorbed with dying, the poems—obviously--are written by the surviving bereaved? That, although I offer no samples of it, true Christian believers, however misguidedly, find dying easiest?

I do not know the answers to these questions. Reader, do you?

Favorite Quotations

Some of what follows may be repetition, but a good thing bears repeating, especially in an age when so much bad stuff is prevailing. So what I am discussing and explicating are touchstones and consolations, as far as anything can console and encourage.

Though I consider Guillaume Apollinaire and Jacques Prevert much greater poets, it is one stanza by Louis Aragon that travels with me, and I quote it here, perhaps not entirely correctly, from memory—I am not a very good memorizer.

Mon amour, j’etais dans tes bras.

Au dehors quelqun murmura

Une vieille chanson de France.

Mon mal enfin s’est reconnu

Et son refrain, comme d’un pied nu,

Troubla l’eau verte du silence.

This was written during the Occupation, when people tried to inure themselves  against terrible times, as presumably did the very leftist and quasi-surrealist Aragon, when what this poem says presumably occurred. I translate:

My love, I was in your arms,/ When outside someone murmured/ An old song of France./ My hurt at last recognized itself,/ And its refrain, as with a bare foot,/ Troubled the green water of silence.

What, I wonder, was that old song that had such a great, shaming and redeeming impact on the surrounding silence? The recognition it provokes—that one cannot accept even unspoken Collaboration with the Nazis—stirs up dormant patriotism and Resistance. The allusion, I take it, is to kids on the border of a lake dangling their feet in the water in carefree leisure. But what is that “green” doing there? I assume that it refers to the treasonous allure of resignation. Green can be the peaceable color of standing water, eliciting inaction, however seductive.

But, this being poetry, there is also the matter of sound. In the last line, the ou  and  a and au are dark sounds, with er and e  transitioning to the brightness of u, i. en. and mute e forming a lure toward connivance. That last line is sheer seduction, wrought by alluring music.

Speaking of music, English poetry offers magisterial means for it. This is largely, but by no means solely, so because the poet has such opportunities provided by there being so often a choice between a romance and an anglo-saxon word, on the order of friendly and amicable, lengthy and long, peaceful and pacific, happy and felicitous, murderer and assassin, verity and truth, endanger and imperil, and so on and on. In my book “Paradigms Lost,” I have a whole chapter on that subject, entitled “Sibling Rivalry.”

Even though my favorite poets in English are Robert Graves and Richard Wilbur, let me reach back to a stanza by the melodious (or tuneful) Swinburne. One concluding (or ending) quatrain of his runs, “And the best and the worst of this is/ That neither is most to blame,/ If you have forgotten my kisses/ And I have forgotten your name.”

This I find sublime. Take the wonderful rhyme “this is” and “kisses.” That is a feminine. i.e., bisyllabic rhyme, in pleasing alternation with the masculine, i.e., monosyllabic one, “blame” and “name.” It is good that both sets use rather commonplace words, which still manage to be surprising in context, without having to reach for less plain, more recherché, words to create rhyme. This is what makes the artful device of rhyme come across as perfectly natural.

And then we have the powerful idea of something being both best and worst, both good and bad. That is no ordinary insight. Haven’t we all gotten over lost loves, and yet this calming oblivion (or forgetfulness) makes something basically sad livable with. It not only neutralizes our suffering, it also exculpates the one who caused it. We are both equally guilty and innocent in a world where there is no black and white, but rather a merciful (forgiving or at least extenuating) gray. And how the words sing!

In German, one favorite bit of poetry comes from an obscure poem written for Marthe Hennebert, a weeping young working-class girl whom Rilke encountered in the street and proceeded to console by making her his girlfriend. A final stanza runs like this:

Befriedigungen ungezaehlter Jahre

sind in der Luft, voll Blumen liegt dein Hut

und ein Geruch aus deinem reinen Haare

mischt sich mit Welt als waere alles gut.

Appeasements of innumerable years

are in the air, your hat lies full of flowers

and a smell from your pure hair

mingles with world as if all were well.

The scene is as in Seurat’s immortal painting, a Sunday afternoon  on the shore of the Seine, with the poet and his new young mistress enjoying a respite, regardless of other people with the same idea. It is all very idyllic, the flowers obviously purchased as a rich bouquet, and laid on top of the divested hat, yet the scent is coming not from them, but from the beloved’s pure hair. Somehow that wonderfully clean and presumably opulent hair exudes an odor di femina (as Italians would have it), something not shop-bought but, dare one say, naturally erotic.

A terrific effect is achieved by that inner rhyme, “deinem reinen”; not only does it intensify the purity of her hair and so flatter the new mistress, it also speeds up the movement to that terrifying ending despite all these wonders still unable to make the world better.  That “as if” is quietly devastating. But what about “the “appeasement of incalculable years”? A tribute, I suppose, to la Grande Jatte,” that playground for so many folk to indulge themselves as Sunday compensation for  working-class stiffs--no need to evoke the Sondheim musical.

                                                                                                                                                           

By locating te appeasement “in the air,” Rilke makes its charm truly ubiquitous, as universal as can be, and yet ultimately not enough. Particularly poignant is calling the world, which in German should be “die Welt,” merely “Welt,” something more mysteriously permeating, as “World” is more cosmically overpowering than an ordinary, known, cozy, everyday “the world.” And yet, with all these inducements to happiness, to a dejeuner sur l’herbe almost, it is still only that hapless quasi-world or threatening superworld, too little or too much. Or “ the best and the worst”—and, as it were, no real picnic.

That is one of the great attributes of poetry, the ability to say so much in so little, to which the apt rhyme-scheme also contributes: the effective alternation of feminine and masculine rhymes, concluding with that strong yet deceptive closer, “gut.”

All of this leads me to a powerful, to me saddening, proof of the impossibility, or near so, of translating  lyrical poetry, where so much depends on sound. A marvelous poem by Hungary’s Baudelaire, the fountainhead of its modern poetry, Endre Ady, has a great ending in “Testamentumot, szornyet, irni/ Es sirni, sirni, sirni, sirni.” (Imagine accent marks on the second o and on the capital E, making them, respectively, an English  er and an a as in lake). I have tried in vain to translate the poem into rhyming verse; in prose, that ending translates “To write a testament, a dreadful one,/And weep, weep, weep, weep.” The prime reason for the untranslatability of this crushing distich is those four “sirni”s, comparable to Lear’s heartrending four “never”s. In English, weep and cry are monosyllables, and those do not resonate as horribly as a quadruple bisyllable, pronounced more or less like “sheerni.” Four “weep”s, like four “cry”s, just don’t do the trick.

To be sure, sometimes a not so great poem can be effectively translated; I have, if I dare say so, published a Serbian verse translation of Kilmer’s “Trees” that works as well as the original.

In English, there are single lines of poetry that do the job for me, notably Cummings’s “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” that affects me even without the assist of Tennessee Williams’s famous appropriation of it. And then there is, horribile dictu, Poe’s horrendous “Quoth the raven Nevermore,” the latter owing its immortality through persiflage. Note that the repeated vowel--e in Poe’s raven and Lear’s outcry, like the i in Ady’s sob--add to the quotability, another poetic device that defies translation. Observe the poetic iteration in device and defies.

Still and all, I tend to wonder why these particular quotations come to me the way equally fine verses do not. Add that fact to the mysteries of poetry. As is the force  of compression, say, in that great early English lyric (circa 1530), which  runs: “O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,/ That the small rain down can rain?/ Christ that my love were in my arms/ And I in my bed again?” Or, perhaps even earlier, the Scot William Dunbar’s “Timor mortis conturbat me,” i.e., “The fear of death unsettles me.”

The penultimate and last quotation are less frequent visitors. The former, because it does not apply to my condition; the latter, because it applies all too much. But even as, in the mystery play, Good Deeds accompanies Everyman to his demise, so do these quotations companion me through life. They do not cure, but they do facilitate.

Foot Fetishism

A fetish is, according to one definition, an object or body part that elicits adoration or sexual arousal, and may in extreme cases be necessary for complete sexual gratification. It involves usually a man’s idea of what is beautiful or sexy about a woman’s foot, foot fetishism by far outnumbering other kind of fetishes.

Most desirable are medium-sized feet. On a large one, toes look like ridiculous, petty appendages; on a small one, they appear ready to devour the entire foot. The main types are the Egyptian foot, with toes of decreasing length from big to little toe; the Roman foot, with the first three toes of more or less the same length, the other two decreasingly smaller; and the Greek or model foot, wit the toes from big to small forming a sort of semicircle. But what constitutes the basic prettiness of a foot?

It is the narrowness, the arch, the coloring and the pliability, what might be covered by the term grace. It constitutes a fine, worthy pedestal for the legs, and so for the entire woman. And it has to belong to a beautiful woman; on an unsightly one, it is merely wasted. Becoming sexualized, it does not transmit social diseases, and does not impregnate, even as it takes over much of the role of the penis under manual stimulation. This is especially useful at a time when social diseases like AIDS are rampant.     

Ultimately, the preferred foot constitutes something delicate and well-proportioned, but definitely not brittle and frangible. And there is also the mystery, that unlike, say, the hand, it is not permanently exposed. What is it like then, hidden under a long skirt or encased in a shoe or boot? How exciting is its revelation when it does become bared. What does induce its being kissed, its toes licked or sucked? Or even, as Freud has emphasized, how attracting by its smell? Moreover, it may be indulged without incurring the onus of profligacy, adultery, or mere unchastity, let alone undesired impregnation.

But finally, it is a special tribute that may signify accepted submission, i.e., satisfy a masochistic trend in the male and a corresponding ascendance of the dominant female. Or, damn it, is it just a tribute to sheer beauty? Otherwise would it be there in so many paintings, particularly in the Renaissance, when beauty was truly appreciated? And beauty does depend on the sensibility of the beholder. Otherwise there would not have been qua ideal the Junoesque, as in Rubens, or the corpulent, as in the Hottentot Venus. Is today’s obeisance to a beautiful foot based on more recent Western aesthetics?

Like it or not, slenderness is a large part of shapeliness, and the foot is where it originates. It is also the locus of ticklishness, which, practiced in moderation, can be aphrodisiac. This is where the reaction of the idol may become relevant. Does the owner of the worshipped foot enjoy it, or merely accept it, or even dislike it? As for the performer, it is what elicits complete though perverse sexual gratification, even if it cannot be rationally explained. But then, can any perversion?

For the performer toying with, or expressing obeisance to, the toes, those five minipenises can guarantee kinky sexual satisfaction. But the woman may enjoy it too as possessor of an additional, adstititious sexual

attractiveness. Let us not forget the more passive, platonic form of sexual fetishism, consisting merely of pleasurable looking at bare female feet. Speaking for myself, I remember sitting next to one of my most beautiful girlfriends as she was driving us to a summer Long Island lease. She was barefoot, and the black pedal provided her very white foot with an enhancing frame. I commented on the beauty of her foot and she was both surprised and, dare I say, tickled pink.

Other girlfriends did not particularly like their feet, and did not especially care about any involvement with them. I may have played with their toes, but certainly went no further with that sort of thing. And I definitely did not share Francois Villon’s seeming attraction to, among other beauties melted away like yesteryear’s snows, “Berte au grant pié,” i.e., Berta Bigfoot. Which brings me to actual or possible foot fetishism in literature.

Let’s start with Sir Thomas Wyatt (1603-1642), Anne Boleyn’s lover, and his most famous quasi-sonnet, beginning “They flee from me that sometime did me seek/ With naked foot stalking in my chamber.” In the plural where the singular would be expected, suggests frequent and casual sex, reinforced by that “stalking.” Is it not interesting that these amorous women are described not by, say, their bared breasts, but by their naked feet, where “naked” is clearly sexier than “bare.” Whatever else this may indicate, it suggests the sexualized feet, otherwise why point to them, “stalking” yet, on plural occasions?

On now a couple of centuries, to Oscar Wilde’s play “Salome.” Later turned into Richard Strauss’s celebrated opera. Wilde wrote the play in French, which his lover, Alfred Douglas, translated into English. We read of Herod, lecherously doting on his stepdaughter Salome,about to dance for him. He exclaims, “Ah, thou art to dance with naked feet. ‘Tis well! ‘Tis well. Thy little feet will be like little white doves. They will be like little white flowers that dance upon the trees . . .” This, coming from the randy tetrarch, surely indicates sexualization of the feet. Not too much can be made of the “naked,” since the French must have “pieds nus,” there being no other word for bare. But still . . .

Let us skip now to 1894 and Gerald du Maurier’s celebrated novel “Trilby.” The eponymous heroine is a young Irish artist’s model in Paris, Trilby O’ Ferrall, introduced wearing a petticoat, “beneath which were visible her bare white ankles and insteps, and slim, straight, rosy heals, clean cut and smooth as the back of a razor; her toes lost in a huge pair of male slippers. She poses in the altogether . . . “head, hands and feet—everything—especially feet. As she kicks off her heavy masculine slipper, she proclaims, “That’s my foot . . . the handsomest foot in all Paris. There is only one in all Paris to mach it, and here it is.” Whereupon “she laughed heartily . . .  and stuck out the other.”

Du Maurier continues. “And in truth they were astonishingly beautiful feet, such as one only sees in pictures and statues—a true inspiration of shape and color, all made up of delicate lengths and subtly-modulated curves and noble straightnesses and happy little dimpled arrangements in innocent young pink and white.”

The hero of the novel, Little Billee, is “quite bewildered to find that a real, bare, live human foot could be such a charming object to look at, and felt that such a base or pedestal lent quite an antique and Olympian dignity to a figure” etc. Further: “The shape of those lovely slender feet (that were neither large nor small) facsimiled in dusty pale plaster of Paris, survives on the shelves and walls of many a studio throughout the world, and many a sculptor yet unborn has yet to marvel at their strange perfection, in studious despair.” And still further, being covered in leather footwear, the foot “is hidden away in disgrace. A thing to be thrust out of sight and forgotten. It can sometimes be very ugly indeed—the ugliest thing there is, even in the fairest and highest and most gifted of her sex, and then it is of an ugliness to chill and kill romance, and scatter love’s young dream and almost break the heart.” I had that feeling when I saw backstage the bared ungainly foot of one of my favorite British actresses.

“Conversely, when Mother Nature has taken extra pains in the building of [the foot], and proper care and happy chance have kept it free of lamentable deformations, indurations, and discolorations—all those gruesome, boot-begotten abominations which have made it so generally unpopular—the sudden sight of it, uncovered, comes as a very rare and singularly pleasing surprise to the eye that has learned how to see!

Nothing else that Mother Nature has to show, not even the human face divine, has more power to suggest high physical distinction, happy evolution, and supreme development, the lordship of man over beast, the lordship of man over man, the lordship of woman over all!

Trilby had respected Mother Nature’s special gift to herself—had never worn a leather boot or shoe, had always taken as much care of her feet as many a fine lady takes of her hands.” To be sure, du Maurier does not write about actual fetishist sex play, nothing about fingering, licking, smelling, and whatever that can be very disturbing to the nonfetishist. It should decidedly pose no problem in a world that has accepted as normal much of what had previously been considered otherwise.

I myself have never become a true foot fetishist, beyond enjoying a beautiful female foot when I see one. This may have originated when I was a boy in Belgrade, gazing at the way maidservants there cleaned floors. They would use a brush attached by a metallic strap to their bare foot and rub away. I had no sense that my interested gaze was somehow sexual, still less that it would generate an adult proclivity. But there, with due restraint, it is.

Above all, there is nothing destructive about foot fetishism; no one is hurt by it, which is more than one can say for some other kinks. As for me, I watch “Dancing with the Stars” on TV, and especially enjoy it when a woman dances barefoot. I never even call it naked feet.

                      

Irony

The text today is irony, from the Greek for dissimulation, as I learn from J. R. Cuddon’s marvelous book (more about that anon), from which I quote the following, enough for an initial definition. “For the Roman theoreticians (in particular Cicero and Quintilian) ‘ironic’ denoted a rhetorical figure and a manner of discourse in which . . . the meaning was contrary to the words, the double-edgedness appearing to be a diachronic feature of irony.”

Please don’t ask me to explain “diachronic,” which would lead me to one of my bêtes noires, the Swiss pundit Ferdinand de Saussure, father of semiology. What was good enough for Cicero and Quintilian will be sufficient for me for the nonce. To recapitulate, saying one thing and meaning its opposite is a sophisticated device unknown to or uncomprehended by hoi polloi. Let me cite as example the beginning of a note from the subtle and sophisticated novelist James Salter, in response to a communication from me: “Dear John, What beautiful handwriting. If I didn’t know you, I would say it shows an orderly mind of great intelligence.” Here the irony was as it were announced by that “If I didn’t know you.” Ordinarily, no such warning that an irony is intended is deemed necessary.

Of course irony should, more or less discreetly, reveal itself as such, as if, for instance, we were to say or write “As the great Stephen King would have it.” To be sure, it may be missed by unsophisticated Americans, the ones whom Hermann Hesse qualified as “blithe and easily satisfied half human.” It can be inferred also by such a remark as Oscar Wilde’s, “Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires complete ignorance of both life and literature.” Or, by way of a more salient example, take the following from Fran Leibowitz: ”Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word ‘collectible’ as a noun, you may consider yourself an unqualified success.” Collectible as a substantive may not be your paradigmatic lapse, like, say, “Greetings from my wife and I,” but it will do. The subtle irony is clear enough.

Or how about this from the great aphorist Georg C. Lichtenberg: “Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede—not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can’t count above fourteen.” What a wonderfully ironic way of saying that most people are stupid. I would go so far as to claim that certain people invite irony by their very look or name. Take an article in the Times of September 5: “National Chief for Gymnastics Is Forced Out After Turmoil.” The chief in question, whose accompanying picture makes her look like a dimwitted blond kewpie doll, is named  Kerry Perry, which a right-minded daughter would have legally changed. Perry was forced out for championing the nefarious doctor Larry Nasser. She had succeeded a gymnastic president named Steve Penny, close enough, though I would have preferred Benny Penny, but you can’t have everything. Still, the article reads like ironic sympathy for Perry.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 I  myself have practiced conspicuous irony, describing Liza Minnelli as a potential winner of a beauty contest--for beagles. At least I picked the seemingly right canine breed: not too pretty, like Afghan or Briard, nor too homely, like bulldog or chihuahua. I regret even more a remark about Diana Rigg in profile in a play’s nude scene as “a basilica with inadequate flying buttresses.” This is always misquoted, even by Ms. Rigg, as a mausoleum etc. The building in question cannot be faulted, as basilicas do not have flying buttresses, any more than do mausoleums, which in this context would have downright sinister implications. At least a basilica is holy.

I am  inclined not to regret my reply to someone’s question about what good things I thought of Adrienne Rich after a poetry reading. I answered that to do justice to it one would need the attributes of a Homer and a Beethoven, namely blindness and deafness. This is a classic irony, as, without requiring elucidation, where what augurs well really disparages.

One of my favorite ironies stems from the wonderful critic Kenneth Tynan. In a review of “Titus Andronicus,”  he referred to Vivien Leigh as a Lavinia who “received the news that she is about to be ravished on the corpse of her husband as one who would have preferred foam rubber.” Thus in the American version; in the British, Tynan used the name of a popular rubber bed brand, which is even funnier, but would not have traction in America.

Another favorite irony is Hilaire Belloc’s epigram about a British lord: “I heard today Godolphin say/ He never gave himself away./ Come, come, Godolphin, scion of kings,/ Be generous in little things.” This is perfect in its switch from evoked nobility to actual mockery without any warning.

Now how about the great Viennese writer and wit Peter Altenberg , a consummate lover of women (especially girls), who allowed: “Coquetry is the immense decency of a desirable woman, thereby, for the moment at least, to hold off the disappointment she is bound to bring you.” This irony is permitted Altenberg (1859-1919), who wrote some of the most affectionate and lyrical prose in praise of women as well as sarcasm. Be it recalled, however, that this often eloquent advocate was, unfortunately for him, a homely man.

Let me point out some obvious everyday ironies. “What a wonderful day” we exclaim as we look out on another gray morning. “How clever you are,” we comment on a dear one’s folly. “We will always be together” we tell a lover whom we no longer love. “I will never do that again” we say after a clumsiness we damn well know we’ll commit again. And so on.

But the really great ironies are in literature as in Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal,” about the poor selling their unwanted babies to England for food. Even the full title is redolent of irony: “A Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burthen to their Parents, or the Country, and for making them Beneficial to the Publick.” This piece of a few pages may be the greatest example of irony in the English language; altogether some of irony’s most distinguished practitioners lived in the eighteenth century. It is there also in “Gulliver’s Travels,” and much of the verse and prose of Alexander Pope. Take only this from one of Pope’s letters: “I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another’s misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.” This manages to make fun of people in general as well as Christians in particular.

J. A. Cuddon’s magnificent “Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory,” is most easily available in America in the Penguin version of its fourth edition, edited by C. E. Preston. It covers six pages with its entry on irony. Delightful to readers and indispensable to writers, it contains, for example, the earliest reference to irony in English, dated 1502: “yronie . . . of  grammare, by the whiche a man sayth one & gyveth to understande the contrary. “ I am amused by the reference to a “splendid essay” on irony  of 1970 by one D. C. Muecke, the name in German meaning mosquito, and being perfect for the subject. Of the many ironists Cuddon cites, from Aeschylus to Iris Murdoch, his favorites are Voltaire, Gibbon, Swift, Henry James and Thomas Mann. He is an expert in writings in the obscurest languages the world over.

There are various forms of irony, including the situational, whereby, for instance, Lear endows his hypocritical, worthless daughters but excoriates and expels his truly worthy, loving one. Similarly, Othello trusts the villain Iago, but rejects and eventually strangles the virtuous Desdemona. Dissimulation, i.e., irony, thrives as dramatic irony, whereby the audience knows things the characters don’t.

In conclusion, I would suggest, utopian as my plea may be, that teachers instruct their students in irony, perhaps even offer a course in it. It would provide an emotional outlet vastly preferable to guns and knives.

Questions

Some questions may be hard to answer, yet they must be asked. And answering is not enough: they must , when answered, also be acted upon. They are like potholes on the roads, so numerous that it would take a lot of effort to correct them, but we must at least try. This may be quixotic, but then isn’t Don Quixote a lovable figure? Isn’t his maladroit meliorism as touching as it is misguided?

So here are some of my urgent questions—urgent seeming at least to me--yet highly unlikely to be acted upon, given the effort that would require. But let it not be said of me that I never asked.

How many more intolerables are we to tolerate from Donald Trump before we take some kind of punitive action? As my friend Kevin Filipski remarked, just one of them from Obama would have landed him in serious trouble; from Trump, they may not go unimpugned, but they clearly remain unacted upon. Why?

The answer is: because the Republicans, even when they disapprove--rarely enough—have nobody better to put forward as a surefire replacement. There are some perfectly good Republicans, but they lack the kind of following to surely beat the Democrats with. (Please note the split infinitive, which, like the sentence-ending preposition, is perfectly all right, yet constantly put forward as pedantry by ignorant foes unaware of what linguists are really about.) In this case, too, as in so many others, it is the ignoramuses who prevail in society,

What could make an intellectual candidate succeed? Better education, i.e., better schools.

But how are we going to get those? It would require more respect and better salaries for teachers on all levels. Teachers, even most professors, are unlikely beneficiaries. Why is that?

There are several reasons. There is, first of all envy: because teachers get longer vacations than most, teaching is assumed to be a cushy job, being its own reward. Teaching the numerous dunderheads, however, is no easy job; rather one demanding indefatigable effort and the patience of saints. Qualifiers for all that may well have a preference for easier, better paid and more prestigious jobs, such as writing potboilers for television or hugging microphones as singers or rappers.

Which is not to say that most pop singers and rappers are really slumming talents.

To be sure, there are sufficient millionaires and billionaires who could spend some of their munificence on education, but, as far as I can tell, that is not a favorite endowment, though, granted, not quite the least favored either. But the problem is that, let us say, if this or that college or university gets a grant, it is more likely to be put to uses other than better teaching. And, sure enough, money for cancer research or victorious football teams, even with pedophile coaches, have to be prioritized.

This said, it must be reckoned with that the United States is a country in which intellectuals are less respected than in many others. Minorities may be favored, as are radicals. Just think who gets to be a MacArthur fellow. In the arts, anyway, it is radicals first. Now I have nothing against women, blacks or lesbians, especially all three together, getting their fair share, but need they be so obviously preferred? George Soros may be more evenhanded, but of how many others can this be even suspected?

                                                                                                                                                             Now, however, to a different, major question. Why are here so few female tennis champions? Actually, more than one, Serena Williams? In male singles, there are a major four—just as there used to be in Chinese politics, a very different field.

In male singles, it was a possible for Djokovic, Federer and Nadal, and somewhat less even Andy Murray, to be steadily, unswervingly at the top of the game. You could count on one of them to win and be for a good while number one in the world. The others might not even bother to compete—they might as well not be there, although very occasionally an anomalous Cilic, Wawrinka, Kyrgios, or Del Potro could horn in.

You may ask what’s so good about that, why shouldn’t some others get a fair chance? The Zwerews, Thiems, Dimitrovs, or Fogninis? Well, because for us spectators it was very comforting to be rooting for a winner, to have our boy be a champion. There was enough variety among those four, and a relaxing sense that even if one of them lost, there was a good chance he might recoup the next time. Only on clay was there a monotony of Rafa Nadal winning over and over again, a real surfeit. If none of them won, one was at a loss about whom to vote for, even if a Raonic or Goffin might be a temporary winner. The Americans especially were a disappointing lot.

But now look at the women: almost every other month there was a different number one. That is when Serena chose to be a devoted mother to a newborn, and perhaps not even then. There was no getting around the fact that Serena could beat them all without being especially likable. Likable? What does that have to do with it? Quite a bit. Without wishing to take away from his glory, a Federer owes at least some of his successes to his charm, to the love of his numerous international supporters. All the more remarkable that the egregiously charmless Nadal should still so consistently excel. To be sure, he too has the most devoted fans in Hispanics, of whom there seems to be no end whenever and wherever he is playing. Let us look at him for a moment.

Nadal seems to be the only crazy champion. Whenever he serves and almost equally when he receives, he exhibits traits that are at best extremely eccentric, if not totally non compos menti. He performs a serving and also receiving ritual that consists  of touching—or tweaking—one ear, then the nose, then the other ear and back again and sometimes even, unsavorily, the back of his pants, which elicits curious interpretations from his ill wishers, of whom there are not a few. Even the containers of the liquids he consumes have to be lined up in a certain order, and he is inclined to take more time than allowed between points. He also has an unappealingly cutthroat look when playing, as if he liked nothing better than cut his opponents’ throats. On the other hand, he seems to be reasonably normal the rest of the time, and is said to be quite charming. Indeed he has a nice smile and a bald patch on the back of his head that humanize him.

Federer, Djokovic and Murray come across perfectly normal, and even at what is in tennis an advanced age, steadily at or near the top. There are, however, newcomers who occasionally win out. But with women players, it is otherwise: there is a new number one every few months, and with the exception of Serena Williams, no steady champion. In a typical match, the temporary favorite will win one set rather easily, then lose the next set just as easily. The third set then becomes the real battle, and can sometimes be very long. This is what makes women’s tennis so frustrating: you really don’t know whom to root for, and even Serena Williams, the only longtime number one, can be dramatically off her game. Her powerful serve can sometimes be missing, which is how a lesser player can—rarely—beat her.

I myself like women players whom I find both talented and attractive, like Julia Goerges  and Garbine Muguruza, and dislike the unsightly ones, like Svetlana Kuznetsova, Carla Suarez Navarro, Ashleigh Barty, Naomi Osaka and a few others in both categories. Many women players have an innate elegance that makes watching them a kind of balletic experience. Among the men, only Federer has that quality, though Djokovic dazzles us with the ability to retrieve seemingly unanswerable shots, turning defense into offence. Also his sense of humor.

I spend many hours watching tennis on TV. My question is will I ever get bored with it? I hope not, even if among the upcoming players there seems to be no one as interesting as the elite four. Along with reading and classical music, it is one of my chief pleasures. I only wish I could share it with my good wife, who, however, does not care for sports.

P.S.: I realize full well that matches are not won on looks, but that does not prevent a fan from watching with greater pleasure a point won by the appealing Camila Giorgi than by the unappealing Madison Keys. However, if I were an umpire or referee (whatever the difference is), I would not allow myself to be swayed by looks.

Lapses

Under the rubric “Lapses,” let me start with two flagrantly poor specimens of usage, which I find particularly painful. Both are exemplars of redundancy: excess verbiage that can and should be jettisoned. It comes in two forms: both as pleonasm, which involves two adjacent, duplicating words of which abuse television is particularly fond, though it crops up everywhere, as in “old crone” (as if there were such a thing as a young crone), and more extendedly  as in a couple of tautologies I will cite.

Consider the abject “the reason is because,” where a simple “because” would do, although “the reason is (that)” is also possible. Take “if young men stutter confronted with a gorgeous woman, the reason is that they can’t control their libido” or “it is because they can’t control their libido,” but not, redundantly, both, as in “the reason is because they can’t” etc. Yet you get this obvious tautology surrounding you like the Cheyennes George Custer.

Now take an even more common and equally egregious tautology of which television is especially culpable, though you get it all over the place, spoken and written by perhaps even you (Et tu Brute): “cannot help but.” Thus “I cannot help but think otherwise” etc. or “we cannot help but commit the sins of our fathers.” Correct would be “I cannot but think” or “I cannot help thinking,” but not both. Yet even in the most prestigious publications you will find this solecism pullulating.

Now you may say, “What does it matter? People will understand you either way.” But it does matter. People will understand it if after a meal of beans you should fart in public—perhaps even overlook it—but that does not make it all right. Correct speech, like correct dress, may be a dying nicety, but people of taste will cling to it and reward you with their esteem if you practice it. Correct speech is an integral part of correct behavior.

However, people nowadays (please not “in this day and age”) can’t help it: they don’t know any better; our education, if it exists at all, has failed them, as even their parents, already undereducated, failed them. I have taught in some very good—well, pretty good—institutions and encountered consistent ignorance. I wonder what goes on at my alma mater, Harvard, these days: are they upholding the standards even there? But just try to correct people, however gently and uncondescendingly, as I suggested in my book Paradigms Lost, and see how they would resent it. As well might you suggest that they use deodorant or zip up their flies. And heaven help you if the person you ever so politely corrected is black or Latino—the most indignant opprobrium would fall upon you with the dead weight of political correctness, which rather outweighs the proverbial ton of bricks.

But hardly anyone would even think of correcting your “old crone” or the horribly pleonastic “free gift,” with which any number of businesses try to lure you into their clutches. It never occurs to them that “gift” is quite enough, yet, sad to say, they may have a point: “free” is a magic word, hard to resist. And as far as upbringing goes, do not expect to see many mouths covered during a yawn. There are inconsistencies, though: “old geezer“ appears to be less frequent than “old crone.” This has to do with geezer being a less well known word than crone, less often heard (partly because it lacks that seductive assonance) and thus considered less guilty of pleonasm.

Which brings me to euphony.  A good deal of redundancy has to do with the appeal of the sound. I wonder whether the pleonastic “telltale evidence” would have escaped, aside from legalistic bombast, without those alliterative Ts. As English is a rather monosyllabic language, a polysyllable has its converse charm. So “today’s youth,” as it were a single word, rolls off the tongue more sonorously than mere “youth” to the listening ear. And then there is repetition, such as “When, oh when?”

which sounds too good for objection. Ditto “Live and let live!” despite its triple alliteration. Rhetoric and oratory thrive on all kinds of redundancy. At other times, redundancy is based on simple ignorance. Thus “from whence” thrives because speakers are not sufficiently familiar with “whence” to realize that it is a synonym for “from where.”

Ignorance can be gross and inexcusable as in the ubiquitous “parameters,” which sprouts everywhere like the weed it is. It is a term in computer science or mathematics, where it makes an esoteric sense unknown to most of us. But having a prestigious scientific aura, it comes across as sophisticated or learned, and thrives however inappropriate. “Limits,” “boundaries,” or “guidelines,” as Bryan Garner points out, would obviate it very nicely.

“Vogue words,” is the term for a fashionable word or phrase, which might be all right in moderation, but grates through often mindless repetition. These words may fade out of existence, but not before their overuse has become offensive. Take, today, “resonate.” This has a certain euphoniousness but a very few years ago things like  “sounds persuasive” or “are widely credited or credible,” or “elicit consent” did the job. Now the air redounds with “resonate” and “resonant” in suffocating proliferation. Or so it would seem. The end is a catchphrase or cliché. To be sure there is no way of measuring quantity of usage or determining exactly when much is overmuch. But a consensus among the intelligentsia may tacitly exist. Aren’t you tired of  “gamechanging” and “lifechanging” experiences, when in fact nothing changes very much?

Let me point out a couple of useful books, as well as anything by Bryan Garner, notably Garner’s Modern English Usage. They are a Dictionary of Cliches by Nigel Rees and  A Dictionary of Catch Phrases by Eric Partridge. To our shame, both authors are British, even though the latter book was published in America. The former comprises some thousand entries, the latter some three thousand. Let me adduce one of the shorter ones from each.

From Rees: “Happy couple. General use, referring to a pair about to be or just joined in matrimony. Known by 1753. A cliché by 1900.’There were cards and good luck messages for the happy couple’ said the insider. But now they don’t look so good, we’re getting phone calls blaming Des for everything again. Daily Mirror (14 January 1995} About 40 friends and family joined the happy couple at the church. Daily Record (28 January 1995). Similarly, Happy Pair. The phrase was known by 1633. And in the specifically marital sense by 1697. Also cliche by 1900.”

                              

From Partridge: “ ‘at this moment in time’ was being used to a nauseating extent in 1974—as indeed it is still—and Verner Noble, writing on 11 September 1974, remarks  ‘As you know, it’s become a cliché. But I now find that its use is considered so ridiculous by the more sensitive kind of people that it is coming into their conversation sarcastically as a catch phrase. It is one of those American importations that had a use for emphasis but has outstayed its welcome. John W. Clark has noted that the cliché ‘at that point in time’ was very frequently used during the Watergate hearings.”

So there you have it. I would like to think that if you are not already one of “the more sensitive kind of people,” this blog post might help induce you to endeavor to become one. I would very much like to welcome you into the club.

Cultured Person

This is about what qualifies an individual as a cultured person. It is perforce so from my particular point of view; from someone else’s, it may well differ. According to Bryan Garner’s important “Garner’s Modern English Usage,” a cultured person has a “cultivated mind, well trained and highly developed.” But just who is that? Here are my views and touchstones, to borrow Matthew Arnold’s term.

To begin with, we must recognize that “cultured” is not quite synonymous with “civilized.” A civilized person spits not on the sidewalk but in the gutter, and lets a lady off the elevator ahead of himself. But he may very well not know who Pasteur or LaRochefoucauld was. I have my own, highly subjective criteria of what makes a cultured person, one who avoids the common mistakes I am about to discuss. It constitutes my notion of someone well-educated, well-spoken, and presumably also well-behaved, except where wit or irony is called for.

Take the illiterate pronunciation of “groceries” as “grosheries,” which some unfortunates consider genteel rather than crassly ignorant. It displays ignorant spelling, if the ignoramus were spelling at all, as of “glacier,” with a “ci” rather than a simple “c” as in “groceries” which is without an “i” after the “c.” You hear it all over television, and just about anywhere else.

Or take the problem of “lie” and “lay,” with the former ineptly dropped from the majority of people’s vocabularies. Few persons now understand that “lay” means movement, as in “I lay the book on the table” or “I lay me down to sleep.” Yet no such locomotion is involved in “the book is lying or lies on the table.” At  a leading hospital, I heard all the nurses and even some younger doctors say “Now lay on your side” or “You should lay asleep by now.” It turns my stomach to hear this from anyone, but especially from someone who should know better. But “lie”—possibly  as an unfortunate homophone for mendacity—has pretty much gone the way of the dodo and the hoop-skirt.

What now about the difference between number and quantity, a frequent pitfall? One should say I now have fewer bad dreams, or its better to have fewer than three children. Where a number of separable items is concerned, it is fewer, as in fewer wrong answers on a quiz. But when measuring is inappropriate or impossible, as in the grains of sand on a beach or in how much you care about a vote in Turkey, it is a matter of less rather than fewer. But the ignorant tendency favors “less” incorrectly, as in less theatergoers on Mondays, or there should be less stations on this train. So it is also less hair on my head, but the fewer hairs in the soup, the better. The former is still not readily measurable, hence less (amount); whereas the number of spoonfuls of a medicine at bedtime is fewer than in the morning. “More” is an exception that goes either way; hence more cups of coffee with more sugar in it.

Now for a business that affects me more than it does others: the name of the great writer Bernard Shaw. He dropped the George, and made amply clear that he did not want to be George Bernard Shaw, as all semiliterates, have it to this day. But the scholars and fans who know his explicit wishes, know that every responsible text of his, such as the seven-volume “Definitive Edition of the Collected Plays with their Prefaces” is by Bernard Shaw, not George Bernard Shaw. Thus it is that the astute Germans, who loved and steadily translated, published, and performed him,  referred to him, without exception, as Bernard Shaw. But show me a printed reference, especially in America, that does not saddle him with a hypertrophic frontal George, to say nothing about this aberrant form even from literati who should know better,

While we are on improper usage, how about wanting to “have one’s cake and eat it too.” This, though Bryan Garner in the aforementioned work accepts it on the basis of current frequency, is absurd. What you cannot achieve is eating your cake and having it too, as Garner admits that earlier writers and speakers (less benighted than the current crop), did invariably get it right. Just think (as most people don’t): you can both jolly well have your cake on Monday, and eat it too on Saturday. But if you have eaten it, no magic or fridge or emetic will have it thereafter. So clearly,

both having and eating does not compute. But all it takes is the one unfortunate who says grosheries or errs about that cake, and before long the lemmings will follow.

What people say—wrongly—is, alas, catching. This is particularly blatant in matters of pronunciation. It used to be always that something was exquisite; slowly but surely it has become accepted also as exquizite, as the dictionaries, rightly or wrongly have it, going by the vox populi. My perhaps oversensitive stomach turns each time I hear it, which is often enough to make my stomach emulate a whirling dervish.

Next we have what the great linguist H.W. Fowler called genteelism. It occurs when the ignorant speaker says “Between you and I,” or “Thank you for inviting my wife and I,” thinking that “I” is more refined than “me,” “less soiled by the lips of the common herd,” as Fowler puts it. Contributing to this misuse is that English is a noninflected language, a trap no German with his declensions distinguishing between an objective and a nominative case would fall into.

Equally repulsive are verbal trends, choices of words and phrases that have become popular in a given period, from whose constant hearing no discriminating speaker is immune. It comes in large measure as one of many blessings showered upon us by television. For some time now the chief offender has been “amazing,” which, leach-like, attaches itself to just about anyone and everything. One gathers that verbally deprived persons are amazed by people and things right and left, whereas one amazing, about human crassness, would quite suffice. This has grated on my well being, which brings me to something similarly appalling if done to the word “well.”

It used to be that if someone asked how you are, and you were, or thought you were, all right (always two words, please), you said “I am well, thank you.” Now you hear from just about everyone “I am good.” But this is nonsense, unless you were trying to say you were a good person, which most people have the sense to avoid. Who knows what would justify calling oneself good, but this much is certain: if you were manifestly good, you would avoid the need and boastfulness of proclaiming it.

Another trendy word these days is “conversation.” Formerly it had one specific meaning: talk between two or among more persons. Nowadays, however, a seemingly endless number of things, some not in the least positive, is called conversation, most of which having nothing to do with exchanged utterances. If you believed what you heard or read, you would think you were living in a world of ceaseless dialogue—which, come to think, as chatter and you actually and regrettably are.

A deplorable loss is that of the sweet, harmless word “as,” which has been pretty much devoured by the omnivorous “like.” No one anymore says “as I think”; it is always “like I think,” even if you don’t particularly practice or like thinking. And I am not even thinking of that other  “like,” which now infests, like a horrible disease, almost every conversation. This may stem from insecurity: if things are introduced with a “like,” it may not be considered as committing, as binding, as they would be without it. It is making a dreadful virtue out of imprecision, and out of evasion of responsibility.

I will not go into the problem of “who” and “whom," to which Garner devotes a goodly amount of print, but I do want to register my displeasure  with one mistake that occurs fairly often in my morning New York Times, and which may also qualify as a genteelism. It is what I would call the mistaken predicate, and it goes like this, to make up an example: “He is one of those poets who is better read aloud.” What is wrong with this? The subject here is not “He,” which would take a singular “is,” but “poets,” which requires a plural “are.” Hence the correct form is “He is one of those poets who are better read aloud.” Tell that to some reasonably cultured but errant writers one reads.

Let me conclude with two ubiquitous mistakes so common in past, present, and doubtless future times. They are the nauseating “I mean” and “you know,” scattered all over speech and hopelessly redundant and useless. Presumably you mean what you are saying, so there is no need to affirm it. And if you have reasonable doubt that some knowledge is needed in your hearer; you simply have to acknowledge that a hopeful “you know” will not generate understanding; you simply have to be clearer to begin with. Peppering your talk with those clichés, however, will only annoy a cultured hearer. But if he or she is uncultured, why bother in the first place?

The trouble with being a cultured person in today’s America is that you end up underpaid if not unemployed. It helps enormously to be practical rather than cultured. In my own experience, I was practical only once in my lifetime, shortly after World War Two in the Air Force, for which I was useless, having neither the inner ear for flying nor the gift for a grease monkey. So I ended up in tasks like KP (kitchen police), in this instance chopping onions for a huge soldiery. As I and my fellow choppers started shedding tears, I came up with a grand idea: Why in hell were we issued gas masks if we don’t use them? Well, they were perfect for chopping onions, and forthwith there were no more tears for me and my fellow choppers. We must have been some sight, but, by golly, it worked: we were as dry-eyed as at those 40s comedies we saw at the movies.