An old friend called me this morning and related a long and complicated tale of legal woe involving the music business. I had little advice to offer, having spent a lifetime studiously avoiding any kind of business dealings. He thought he might want me to re-write some lead sheets, but wanted to ask his attorney if that would be necessary.
“Well, keep me apprised,” I said, thinking to sign off. I could have said, “Keep me filled in,” or “Keep me up to date,” or “Let me know what your lawyer says,” but “apprised” was the first word that popped into my head
“Is that the way you say it? ‘Apprised?'” my friend asked.
“Yup,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” I said. “I’m an English teacher. I’m the pro from Dover.”
I should have said I’m a retired English teacher, and I’ve been away from the game long enough that I thought I’d better go check my recollection. Time for my almost daily visit to the 1941 Webster’s New International Dictionary, Unabridged that’s lived on its own little reading stand in every house I’ve inhabited since I was born. It needs its own stand because it weighs nearly 16 pounds and stands 6 inches tall, unopened. Here’s what it had to say:
“apprise (v.t.) (a-prīz’) apprised, apprising, also apprize (F. appris, fem. apprise, past participle of apprendre, to learn, teach, inform, see apprehend, apprentice) to give notice, verbal or written (to a person), to inform. Often followed by of ; also, to give notice of (a thing)
Knock, and apprise the Count of my approach Byron
Syn. – acquaint, advise, inform. See inform.”
I’d had to fetch my granddad’s magnifying glass to read the tiny type, but that wasn’t terribly burdensome. In fact, I always like using that big, round magnifier with its tarnished brass ferrule and walnut handle worn smooth by more than a hundred years of use. I can see my granddad’s rheumy old eyes peering through it at the morning paper. He was a dear man who lived with my family during his last years after his beloved wife died. I somehow inherited his magnifying glass along with the Webster’s Unabridged, and now my rheumy old eyes are glad I did.
I could, of course, have simply googled “apprise,” and instantly found this:
“apprise [əˈprīz] VERB inform or tell (someone).
“I thought it right to apprise Chris of what had happened”
synonyms:
inform · notify · tell · let know · advise · brief · intimate · make aware of .”
This would have advised me that my use of “apprise” was correct, that it meant what I’d intended it to mean. It would not have told me whether the verb required an object or not, or whether its principal parts were regular or not, or that it had come into the English language, like so many other words, with the Norman invaders, or the names of its French-English cousins, or by which preposition it should often be followed. Or that it had been good enough for Byron.
Had I taken Webster’s advice to see inform, and pursued it through seven variant meanings, meaning 7.2 would have acquainted me with the fact that “Inform, apprise may often be used interchangeably. But inform, the general term, emphasizes the actual imparting of facts or knowledge of whatever sort; apprise, the more formal and less common term, frequently carries the implication of giving notice of something.” This seems, no matter how long I ponder it, a distinction without an appreciable difference to me, and an example of the kind of refinement of meaning to the point of no return that gives intellectuals a bad name.
I’d spent a working lifetime advising my students against using the more formal, less common term, but here I was, doing exactly that. The fine novelist William Humphrey had elegantly explained my reasons for that advice. He had taken to reading books about fishing, and found that “The angler had metamorphosed into the ichthyologist, and the prevailing prose reflected the change – if mud can be said to reflect. I found myself correcting it as I had done freshman themes in my years as a professor. You had to hack your way through it as through a thicket. Participles dangled, person and number got separated and lost, cliches were rank, thesaurusitis and sesquipedalianism ran rampant, and the rare unsplit infinitive seemed out of place, a rose among nettles. Yet, instead of weeding their gardens, these writers endeavored to grow exotics in them: orchids, passionflowers. Inside each of them was imprisoned a poet, like the prince inside the toad. What came out was a richness of embarrassments: shoddy prose patched with purple – beautifully written without first being well written.”
Many people write so if they want to impress (or con) their English teachers. I didn’t want to read any more of such writing, so I advised my students against using words just because they looked impressive. I adjured them to take Mark Twain’s advice: “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” (Letter to D. W. Bowser, 3/20/1880)
I didn’t stop adjuring there. Hemingway had implied similar advice: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.” (Plimpton, G.,ed, Writers at Work, Second Series, Viking, 1963) So, in their ways had Katherine Anne Porter – “But there is a basic pure human speech that exists in every language. And that is the language of the poet and the writer….You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence – that is, the highest intelligence that one is able to reach. (Plimpton, Ibid) and William Carlos Williams – “I couldn’t speak like the academy. It had to be modified by the conversation about me. As Marianne Moore used to say, a language dogs and cats could understand. So I think she agrees with me fundamentally. Not the speech of English country people, which would have something artificial about it; not that, but language modified by our environment; the American environment.” (Cowley, Ibid) So had Pat Conroy: “I dislike pretentious words, those highfalutin ones with a trust fund and an Ivy League education. Often they were stillborn in the minds of academics, critics, scientists. They have a tendency to flash their warning lights in the middle of a good sentence. In literary criticism my eye has fallen on such gelatinous piles as “antonomasia,” “litotes,” or “enallage.” I’ve no idea what those words mean nor how to pronounce them nor any desire to look them up.” (Pat Conroy, My Reading Life, Doubleday, 2010)
I’m with Conroy. I did look up “enallage,” and read several tortured definitions of the term which left me none the wiser. At best. “A figure of speech used to refer to the use of tense, form, or person for a grammatically incorrect counterpart.” Oh. Could you find a better example of a gelatinous pile?
So I share with these fine writers a distaste for fancified, pretentious, or otherwise overly complicated terminology. Or so I’ve always thought, until my friend’s question got me thinking about the words I use that probably seem to exemplify such qualities.
Just last week I received two letters from old friends, one as voracious a reader as I am, one a professional writer. The former remarked on the appearance of “synecdoche,” “elisions,” and “septuagenarian” in my most recent letter. The latter, having read a memoir I’d sent him, wrote, “It also reminds me I haven’t used the word ‘pusillanimous’ in any book lately. I must make a note.” (I expect he was kidding.) I hadn’t used any of those words in order to impress my correspondents. They’d simply been the first words that occurred to me.
Obviously “synecdoche” and “elision” occurred to me because I had been an English teacher, and those are two shards of jargon from that world. Like all professional jargon, they’re designed to fence out the vulgar lay public. All “synecdoche” means is “taking the part for the whole.” “Elisions” are simply sentences or passages from which someone has eliminated some words, sometimes in the interest of brevity, sometimes in the interest of distortion.
For example, had I been writing about Babe Ruth, I might have called him “the collosus of the diamond,” and been responsible for a metaphorical synecdoche. I would have meant that Ruth towered over the game of baseball in his day – represented by the “diamond” – as Chares’ Colossus had once towered over the harbor of Rhodes. In Ruth’s day, sportswriters would have indulged in such language without a second thought, knowing that the sports fans who read them had been educated sufficiently in world history to get the comparison and sufficiently in the English language to understand that “the diamond” here meant “the game of baseball.”
“Septuagenerian,” I must admit, is no improvement on “70-79-year-old” except that it’s more rhythmically pleasing and doesn’t take so long to pronounce. I learned it, I’m sure, reading books from earlier centuries, when nearly all literate people had also been schooled sufficiently in Latin that the meaning of “septuagenerian” would be immediately apparent to them. I’m sure I had to look it up when I first ran across it, and it stuck with me, probably, because I liked the way it felt in my mouth. Same reason “pusillanimous” – another import from Latin -stuck with me – it sounded as contemptuous as I wanted it to sound. (Since in the memoir my writer friend referred to I was describing my own pusillanimity, I felt I’d earned the right to contempt.)
I wasn’t using any of those words to try to impress anyone. They were parts of my reading and writing and speaking vocabularies – probably not everyday parts, since I only occasionally needed them – words of long enough acquaintance that they didn’t strike me as any more exotic than “cat” or “dog.” If someone else had to go look them up in the dictionary, that didn’t seem such a bad thing.
Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography about his discovery of the dictionary during his final stay in prison: “With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia…. I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, i could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying….months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.”
On the one page of my Webster’s that held “apprise,” I found seven words I’d never seen before, or at least didn’t remember seeing. Some were highly specialized, some listed as obsolete. I couldn’t imagine finding myself in circumstances that ever required my using some of the others. But then, I’d never imagined i’d find myself officiating at a wedding between a stockbroker and a Venezuelan heiress in the glowering presence of the latter’s adolescent son. Let alone had I imagined the elisions that could be made in the wedding ceremony if you just wanted, pusillanimously, to get it over with. Life is indeed full of surprises, and knowledge can only be called “useless” until you need to know it. Same goes for words. Life will keep you apprised of those truths.
