excerpts – ‘A Note on the Family Tongue’
“SINCE BOTH WJ AND HJ were lifelong writers, the most enduring influence from their father was his gift of language.” — F. O. Mathiessen
Posted here (PDF above):
F. O. Mathiessen, “A Note on the Family Tongue”
IN F. O. Mathiessen, The James Family: Including Selections from the Writings of Henry James, Senior, William, Henry, & Alice James (New York: Afred A. Knopf, 1961), pp. 101-112
— posted by Roger W. Smith
May 2025
My wife called something to my attention in the New York Times this morning. She had a problem with the second paragraph in the following story:
“On Eve of Trial, Discovery of Carlson Texts Set Off Crisis Atop Fox”
By Jim Rutenberg, Jeremy W. Peters, and Michael S. Schmidt
The New York Times
April 26, 2023
The second paragraph read:
Private messages sent by Mr. Carlson that had been redacted in legal filings showed him making highly offensive and crude remarks that went beyond the inflammatory, often racist comments of his prime-time show and anything disclosed in the lead-up to the trial.
I think I know why the sentence ended up the way it did. Because of newspaper-writing conventions regarding conciseness. The rule or standard is: Get rid of as many words as you can whenever and wherever they can be omitted (without omitting key facts or becoming unintelligible).
But there is a problem here.
comments OF HIS PRIME-TIME SHOW is vague and fuzzy. Were they comments that Carlson alone made (this is implied, but it could also include comments made by guests/interviewees)? Were they comments that he spoke or that were posted on the screen in bullet point fashion? In my mind it’s too vague. And awkwardly worded. It seems that comments ON his prime-time show would be better (sounds better to the ear). But then that’s not clear, because it could be anyone’s comments.
The best way to say it (undoubtedly) is comments made by Carlson on his prime-time show. This adds three words (the phrase made by Carlson on replaces the word of).
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My post
regarding Professor Strunk’s admonition, “Omit Needless Words.” (or, are long, complex sentences bad?)
is pertinent here.
I quoted Professor Brooks Landon in his lecture ““Grammar and Rhetoric” (lecture 2, “Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft”; The Great Courses/The Teaching Company).
Unless the situation demands otherwise, sentences that convey more information are more effective than those that convey less. Sentences that anticipate and answer more questions that a reader might have are better than those that answer fewer questions. Sentences that bring ideas and images into clearer focus by adding more useful details and explanation are generally more effective than those that are less clearly focused and that offer fewer details.
Many of us have been exposed over the years to the idea that effective writing is simple and direct, a term generally associated with Strunk and White’s legendary guidebook The Elements of Style, or we remember some of the slogans from that book, such as, “Omit needless words.” … [Stunk concluded] with this all important qualifier: “This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.” … Strunk’s concern is specifically with words and phrases that do not add propositions to the sentence [e.g., “owing to the fact that” instead of “since”].” … “Omit needless words” is great advice, but not when it gets reduced to the belief that shorter is always better, or that “needless” means any word without which the sentence can still make sense.
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Addendum:
My journalism school instructor, New York Times city reporter Maurice (Mickey) Carroll, taught me to tighten up my stories. His editing was invaluable. Here is an example from one of my assignments.
So I understand and appreciate the need for conciseness in newspaper reporting. But I also think Professor Landon’s astute observations should be kept in mind.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
April 27, 2023
Scholars who visit this site may be interested in a post of mine on footnoting on my personal site, rogersgleanings.com, at
I can’t understand why the topic does not engage more readers of scholarly works. Word processing software makes footnote and endnote formatting a breeze — so why can’t they be done to make consulting them less of a chore? — and, in the examples I have given, it is more than a chore, it’s enough to drive a scholar who wants to find a source mad with frustration.
— Roger W. Smith
December 2022
Walt Whitman, ‘Slang in America’ – North American Review, November 1885
Posted here (PDF file above):
Walt Whitman, ‘Slang in America”
North American Review
November 1885
“Language, be it remembered, is not an abstract construction of the learned, of of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity. ….”
— posted by Roger W. Smith
August 2022
“These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up.”
— Charles Manson, trial testimony, November 17, 1970
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“The museum’s exhibition about the statue was partly a response to the defacing of it by protesters, who in 2017 splashed red liquid representing blood over the statue’s base. The protesters, who identified themselves as members of the Monument Removal Brigade, later published a statement on the internet calling for its removal as an emblem of ‘patriarchy, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.’
“ ‘Now the statue is bleeding,” the statement said. “We did not make it bleed. It is bloody at its very foundation.’ .” [italics added]
— “Roosevelt Statue to Be Removed From Museum of Natural History,” by Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times, June 21, 2020
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This is impoverished rhetoric (by the so-called Monument Removal Brigade). Which is actually inane.
It shows the impoverishment of their ideas, mental and moral vacuity on the part of so-called revolutionary reformers, and the emptiness of vandalism (excuse me, protest actions).
I could have done better in the third grade.
— Roger W. Smith
June 2020
Something occurred to me when I was half awake this morning.
You may say it’s self evident or trivial.
I was reading something in the newspaper and a sentence or two came into my mind.
(Sort of like one is driving and sees a sign ahead.)
He is dead.
His writing lives on.
My brain works like a writer’s. I think in sentences and paragraphs and very literally– like I’m always writing an English paper.
How do you punctuate that, I thought.
1. He is dead, his writing lives on.
2. He is dead; his writing lives on.
3. He is dead. His writing lives on.
Option 1 – No. Maybe okay for a fiction writer, but a comma splice.
Option 2 – I like to use a semicolon, but not here.
Option 3 – The best choice. Keep as two short, independent sentences. Reads best and is clearest.
Sentences are indeed the building blocks of expository writing. Short or long.
— Roger W. Smith
May 21, 2020
In a text I bought for my German course, Basic German: A Grammar and Workbook, 2nd Edition, by Heiner Schenke, Anna Miell, and Karen Seago, pg. 7, it says:
A verb with a personal ending — e.g., Woher kommst du? Ich wohne in Frankfurt, Woher kommst du? — is called a finite verb. This is in contrast to the infinitive form of verbs.
I never knew.
In other words, a verb when used with a subject and tense — we speak, they spoke, English is spoken — is finite, determinate; there is definite action, occurrence.
But, yes, Shakespeare can write to be or not to be, but to be is timeless, so to speak. But, I was satisfied — this refers to the past and an actual point on time, whether specified or not.
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I love learning new things. In the category of learning “I never knew that.” Something simple that should have been obvious, but that for me represents a discovery.
When you learn it, some fundamental that increases overall understanding is now part of your mental repertoire.
— Roger W. Smith
February 2020
Waiting for an elevator with me at 826 Broadway on February 13 last week there were two women who were chatting.
We were all going to a concert of medieval music in the Strand Bookstore’s rare book room. I had entered at the Strand’s main entrance next door, at 826 Broadway. I had bought a book that looked very interesting: Wordsworth’s Classical Undersong: Education, Rhetoric and Poetic Truth by Richard W. Clancey. The subject matter fits right in with the focus of this blog. I often find interesting books at the Strand by serendipity.
One of the women said to the other that (as I had experienced) she could not get to the Strand rare book room by entering at the store’s main entrance and walking up or taking the elevator from there to the third floor, as I had tried to do. (The nonfiction books on literature are in the basement, a usual first stop form me.) She said to her interlocutor: “They have a red cord thing” blocking passage to the rare book room from the main store and that therefore she had recognized you had to take the elevator (as we were doing at that moment) next door.
That’s a redundancy, I thought to myself. I am always “proofreading” and “editing” people’s speech (including broadcasters’ and newspaper reporters’) whenever I detect what I am sure is a grammar error or infelicity of style.
Or is it redundant? I thought.
She could have said, as an English teacher would probably so correct a student’s sentence to: There was a red cord blocking the door. Or, A red cord was blocking the door.
But “red cord thing” actually conveys her meaning very well. For she wasn’t certain whether it was a cord (a piece of rope), a string, tape, or whatever. But something resembling a cord such as one sees in a rope line or tape blocking access to accident and crime scenes, something red, was blocking access.
Young women whom one constantly hears chatting on their cell phones often get made fun of by grammar snobs such as myself for using like constantly as an intensifier or qualifier. He seemed like about to go crazy; or, I saw a guy who was like riding a bike with no hands.
English is a marvelously fertile and flexible language, rich in nuance. New ways of saying things in non-formal speech are always being come up with. Such as the use (perhaps overuse) of the all-purpose like as an adverb, and many expressions that convey the meaning exactly, but who would of thought of them before they were invented, e.g., couch potato and soccer mom.
–Roger W. Smith
February 2020
THE TELLING EXAMPLE
The kind partiality with which every man looks upon his own fraternity, is generally discovered in his acts of munificence. The merchant seldom founds hospitals for the soldier; nor the sailor endow colleges for the student. [italics added] Every man has had most opportunities of knowing the calamities incident to his own course of life: And who can blame him for pitying those miseries which he has most observed?
It is with the same kind of propension that I have always rejoiced to see the theatres made instrumental to the relief of literature in distress; and though I would not willingly oppose any act of charity, I cannot but confess a higher degree of pleasure, in contributing to the support of those, who have themselves contributed to the advancement of learning; and therefore take, with uncommon satisfaction, this opportunity of informing the town, that next Tuesday will be acted, at Covent Garden, The Way of the World, for the benefit of an unfortunate bookseller [James Crokatt]; a person, who, in his happier state, was little guilty of refusing his assistance to men of letters; whose purse often relieved them, and whose fertility of schemes often supplied them with opportunities of relieving themselves.
PARALLELISM
Many of the most voluminous and important works, which the industry of learning has lately produced, were projected by his [Crokatt’s] invention, undertaken by his persuasion, and encouraged by his liberality. The time is now come when he calls, in his turn, for assistance; and it is surely the duty of the publick to reward, by uncommon generosity, the benefits which he has conferred upon them, without the usual advantage to himself. (italics added) — Samuel Johnson, Letter to the Daily Advertiser Concerning James Crokatt (1751), IN Johnson on Demand: Reviews, Prefaces, and Ghost-Writings, edited by O M Brack, Jr., and Robert DeMaria, Jr. (The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume XX; Yale University Press, 2019), pg. 221
This letter was written by on behalf of the London book trade entrepreneur James Crokatt, who having experienced business and financial difficulties, was in debtors’ prison.
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From immersion in the works of a writer of Johnson’s stature, I would be inclined to say that:
Anecdotes from the early chapters of Boswell’s Life of Johnson show that Johnson at a very young age was what we would today call a gifted child and that he was intellectually precocious.
It is also apparent from Johnson’s own accounts (and those of schoolmates) that his grammar school instruction was very rigorous in the area of rhetoric, including instruction in Latin. (I believe that his fluency in Latin along with his mastery of the king’s English contributed to, and in fact resulted in, his knowledge of and proficiency in rhetoric and mastery of the rules of exposition and grammar, whereby the “operating principles,” so to speak, of verbal expression were ingrained in him — at his command.) *
Ergo, Johnson wrote as well as he did because he was a born writer and also because he worked so hard at achieving mastery.
* The following quote is apropos. I can relate it to my own experience of foreign language study.
“Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.” (He who is ignorant of foreign languages, knows not his own.)
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (1833)
— Roger W. Smith
January 2020
Roger's rhetoric 