It’s been a year that I’ve had the surpassing privilege of sharing “Lederer on Language” with you, my verbivorous readers. This first anniversary provides an occasion for me to state my core belief about that astounding phenomenon that we call language.

For more than five decades I’ve had the joy of writing about language — from puns to punctuation, pronouns to pronunciation, diction to dictionaries, palaver to palindromes. From the time I began pouring my words about words into textbooks, journals and books, I have always felt that I was writing about the most deeply human of inventions — language. Words and people are inextricably bound together. Whether the ground of your being is religion or science, you find that language is the hallmark, the defining characteristic that distinguishes humankind from the other creatures that walk and run and crawl and swim and fly and burrow in our world.

In the Genesis creation story that so majestically begins the Bible (Genesis 1:1-31; 2:1-6), we note the frequency and importance of verbs of speaking: “And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. … And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. … And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. … And God called the firmament Heaven. … And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas; And God saw that it was good.” (Emphasis mine.)

Note those verbs of speaking and naming. God doesn’t just snap his fingers to bring the things of the universe into existence. He speaks them into being and then names each one.

And what happens when God creates Adam?: “And out of the ground the lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof” (Genesis 2:19-22). In other words, Adam (Hebrew for “humankind”) does what God has done: He names things; he names voraciously; he names everything. Perhaps this is what the Bible means in Genesis 1:26-27: “And God said, Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them.” Like God, man is a speaker and a namer.

If your mythos is science, you believe that many early hominid species, some of them coexisting, preceded the tenure of Homo sapiens. Today we take for granted that we are the only hominids on Earth, yet for at least 4 million years many hominid creatures shared the planet, including Homo habilis, Homo erectus and, of course, Homo neanderthalensis.

What made us different? What allowed us to survive while our precursors disappeared? The answer is on the tip of our tongues. While some of these other species possessed the physical apparatus to talk, only with Homo sapiens did speech tremble into birth, did speech embrace thought, did speech become creative and generative, did speech inflame us to name everything.

The birth of language is the dawn of humanity, and each is as old as the other. The appearance of language made us human, and our humanity ensured the survival of language. We human beings have always had language because before we had it, we were not fully human and the sounds that escaped from the holes in hominid faces were not fully language. Not only do we possess language; we are language.

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com

Many thanks for your bull’s-eye analysis of this eyesore on our freeways, streets and roads. Most authorities identify alumni as a plural noun referring to male graduates or males and females collectively, but the most common mistake is not one of gender but one of number, as in “I am an alumni of ___ University.”

Whenever I spot one of those “___ University Alumni” signs affixed to a car not traveling in an HOV lane, I look to see if there’s a single driver inside. If so, the message can’t be accurate. As you point out, the solution is to issue two versions of the license plate holder: “___ Alumnus” for men and “___ Alumna” for women.

To summarize — alumnus (pronounced a-LUM-nuh): a male graduate; alumna (a-LUM-nuh): a female graduate; alumni (a-LUM-nigh): male graduates or male and female graduates; alumnae (a-LUM-nee): female graduates. The pronunciations I’ve just provided are correct in modern English, even if they’ve strayed a bit from the way Julius Caesar probably sounded these words.

Dear Mr. Lederer: Thanks for sharing your grammatical knowledge with us in the Saturday U-T, and thanks for inviting our questions. Mine is this: Do I ask you to try and help me, or do I ask you to try to help me? I think it should be try to, but mostly I hear try and. Try and sleep, try and stay awake, try and get this email done, etc. I will try to be patient while awaiting your response. — Lindsay Skinner, San Diego

The use of try and for try to has become an established idiom in everyday speech and, increasingly, in writing. This substitution of the conjunction and for the to that is part of an infinitive verb happens almost exclusively with the verb try.

But, in this context, and doesn’t actually join two actions. If I say or (gasp!) write “I’ll try and help you,” I don’t mean to describe two separate occurrences: “First, I’ll try, and then I’ll help you.” Rather, the and in this construction supplants the more logical to, which is supposed to kick off an infinitive phrase that acts as a noun and tells what will be tried. I recommended that you try to stick with the infinitive construction.

Dear Mr. Lederer: It has been driving me nuts to hear people say the word height with a th sound at the end, and it seems to be contagious!!! Isn’t it correctly pronounced with a hard t sound? I have been hearing this for a long time now and was so happy to see your column in the paper so I could vent my frustrations. Is it just me? — Antoinette Hamilton, San Diego

No, it’s not just you, Antoinette. Height is indeed properly pronounced with a hard t. The atrocity that is heighth is the spawn of the model long-length, broad-breadth, deep-depth and wide-width. But high-height doesn’t fall into that pattern. Be very afraid of heighth; height will suit you to a t.

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com 

• The English used to call the yellow, shaggy weed a “lion’s tooth” because the jagged, pointed leaves resemble the lion’s snarly grin. During the early 14th century, the lion’s-tooth plant took on a French flavor and became the dent-de-lion, “tooth of the lion.” Then it acquired an English accent: dandelion.

• In Greek mythology, the blessed spent their afterlife in the Elysian fields, which were carpeted with a flower the Greeks named asphodelos. Over time, the word gained an initial d and eventually became daffodil.

• Also from ancient mythology we inherit narcissus, a handsome and usually white or yellow flower. The name echoes the ancient Greek myth of the handsome Narcissus and the doomed Echo. Echo was a beautiful nymph who once upon a time aided Zeus in a love affair by keeping Hera, his wife, occupied in conversation. As a punishment for such verbal meddling, Hera, the queen of the gods, confiscated Echo’s power to initiate conversation and allowed her to repeat only the last words of anything she heard.

Such was a sorry enough fate, but later Echo fell madly in love with an exceedingly handsome Greek boy, Narcissus, who, because of Echo’s peculiar handicap, would have nothing to do with her. So deeply did the nymph grieve for her unrequited love that she wasted away until nothing was left but her voice, always repeating the last words she heard.

The fate that befell Narcissus explains why his name has been transformed into words like narcissism and narcissistic, “pertaining to extreme self-love.” One day Narcissus looked into a still forest lake and beheld his own face in the water, although he did not know it. He at once fell in love with the beautiful image just beneath the surface, and he, like Echo, pined away for a love that could never be consummated.

• Daisy was created in Old English from the poetical “day’s eye.” The flower is indeed a metaphor waiting to be born, with its sunburst center, its radiating white petals, and its sensitivity to the progress of the day, opening during the sunny hours and closing in the evening and extinguishing its brightness. The poet Geoffrey Chaucer, without benefit of any linguistic manual, referred to the sun as “the day’s eye, or else the eye of day.”

• Of the various plants associated with the Christmas season, the poinsettia possesses the most intriguing history etymologically. A Mexican legend tells of a penniless boy who presented to the Christ Child a beautiful plant with scarlet leaves that resembled the Star of Bethlehem. The Mexicans named the plant Flor de la Noche Buena (“Flower of the Holy Night”). Dr. Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. minister to Mexico, discovered the Christmas flower there in 1828 and brought it to this country, where it was named in his honor in 1836. The flaming poinsettia has become one of the most popular of Christmas plants — and one of the most misspelled and mispronounced (pointsettia, pointsetta, poinsetta) words in the English language.

• The tulip’s cup-shaped “mouth” may remind you of “two lips,” but that is not how the flower got its name. The Dutch borrowed tulip from the French (tulipan), who purloined it from the Turks (tulbend), who noted that the shape of the flower reminded them of a turban.

May you not read ’em and weep, but, rather, weed ’em and reap. May your garden yield a fruitful bounty, and may you learn, in the words of poet Robert Louis Stevenson, to “judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.”

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com verbivore.com

Sponsored by the San Diego Shakespeare Society(sandiegoshakespearesociety.org), elementary, middle and high school students will perform 10-minute scenes, sonnets, music and dance from William Shakespeare’s astonishing works. As a vivid emblem of the Bard’s universality, students from two high schools in Moscow will perform their excerpts as part of the festival. And trust me: These youngsters don’t just read Shakespeare; they become his characters.

In addition to chewing the scenery on one of the stages, I’ll be hanging out before and after the performances and would love to meet you at the Prado. The only admission fee is your love of, at least curiosity about, the playwright and poet of whom Ben Jonson wrote: “He was not of an age but for all time.”

Anticipating the student performances, I offer a pop quiz on Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Answers are below.

1. How many plays did Shakespeare write?

2. What are the three categories by which the plays are generally classified?

3. Into how many acts is each play traditionally divided?

4. In what verse form did Shakespeare write his plays?

5. What do we call the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected works?

6. How many sonnets are in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence?

7. How many lines are in a typical Shakespearean sonnet?

8. Identify the plays begun by each of the following lines:

a. Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this son of York:

b. Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

c. Hence! home, you idle creatures, get you home! Is this a holiday?

d. If music be the food of love, play on

e. Who’s there?

f. When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

9. Name the lover or wife of each of the following characters: a. Romeo; b. Antony; c. Petruchio; d. Benedick; e. Hamlet; f. Othello; g. Brutus; h. Henry V; i. Troilus; j. Touchstone; k. Ferdinand; l. Duke Orsino.

10. Name the Shakespearean heroes with whom each of the following enemies contend: a. Iago; b. Macduff; c. Laertes and Claudius; d. Hotspur; e. Octavius Caesar; f. Richmond; g. Brutus and Cassius.

Answers

1. 37

2. tragedies, comedies, and histories

3. five

4. blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter

5. the First Folio

6. 154

7. 14

8. a. “Richard III”; b. “Romeo and Juliet”; c. “Julius Caesar”; d. “Twelfth Night”; e. “Hamlet”; f. “Macbeth”

9. a. Juliet; b. Cleopatra; c. Katharina; d. Beatrice; e. Ophelia; f. Desdemona; g. Portia; h. Katharine; i. Cressida; j. Audrey; k. Miranda; l. Viola

10. a. Othello; b. Macbeth; c. Hamlet; d. Prince Hal (Henry V); e. Antony; f. Richard III; g. Julius Caesar.

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com verbivore.com

Brush up your Shakespeare.

Start quoting him now.

Brush up your Shakespeare,

And the women you will wow.

— Cole Porter, “Kiss Me, Kate”

Name a play written by Bartley Campbell. Of course you can’t, nor can just about anyone else alive today. Yet Campbell (1843-1888) was a popular American playwright whose giant ego towered above his talent. His professional stationery depicted two portraits on the letterhead — Bartley Campbell on one side and William Shakespeare on the other — linked by the words “A friendly rivalry.” Today Campbell, a legend in his own mind, is forgotten, while Shakespeare endures and prevails as the one big gun in the canon of English literature that has no rival.

William Shakespeare is the darling of readers, playgoers and critics alike. The critical work directly about the Bard or in some way relevant to him could constitute a library, and in fact does: the superb 280,000-volume Folger Library in Washington, D.C. Even if you somehow devoured that collection, you would still have to read 3,000 discussions of Shakespeare each year to keep up with the new scholarship.

As the Huntsman in “King Henry VI” says, “This way, my lord, for this way lies the game.” Here’s an untrivial quiz on a far-from-trivial author. Supply the basic facts about Shakespeare’s life posed by the following questions:

1. List the dates of William Shakespeare’s birth and death.

2. In what town and country was Shakespeare born?

3. Name the monarchs who reigned in Shakespeare’s country during his lifetime.

4. Name Shakespeare’s wife. “Mrs. Shakespeare” is not acceptable.

5. How many children did the Shakespeares have?

6. With what theater was Shakespeare most intimately connected?

7. What was the name of Shakespeare’s acting company?

8. Some scholars believe that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. Name three people who, some claim, penned the plays that we attribute to the Stratford man.

9. What is the importance of the following lines (in the original spelling)?:

Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare, To digg the dust encloased heare! Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones, And curst be he yt moves my bones.

10. One of Shakespeare’s contemporaries rightly foresaw the magnitude of the Bard’s achievement when he wrote of Shakespeare: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” Name the writer of that sentence.

As Belarius exclaims in “Cymbeline,” “The game is up!” It’s now time to consult the answers.

Answers

1. and 2. Shakespeare was baptized in Holy Trinity Church in the English village of Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564, and was probably born three days earlier, on April 23. He died in Stratford on April 23, 1616.

3. Elizabeth I and James I

4. Anne Hathaway (but not the woman who sang and wept in “Les Misérables”)

5. Three: Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith

6. The Globe

7. For most of his career, Shakespeare was a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, later known as the King’s Men.

8. Candidates include Sir Walter Raleigh; Edward Devere, the Earl of Oxford; Francis Bacon; Christopher Marlowe; Mary Spenser Herbert and the Earl of Essex.

9. These words are the epitaph on Shakespeare’s grave in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church.

10. Ben Jonson

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com

Many ages passed, millions of years, and the muck about the dinosaur’s body hardened and fossilized. Pressures built, and the gray beast took on the black of the soil enwrapping it, and the dark remains became compressed. Gradually, ever so slowly, the creature turned into coal. More eons elapsed and more weight pressed down upon the coal, until, deep in the earth, beneath layers and layers of history, the dinosaur became a diamond.

That is all we have left of the great beast, and yet the story has ended happily. For in that diamond’s glittering facets are the compacted memories of all the time that has passed between that long-ago dinosaur and us, who today marvel at the diamond’s brilliant whiteness and who listen to this story.

Poems are life transmuted into diamonds, compact and indestructible. Nowadays, poetry may seem an artificial refinement of natural speech. But in the literature of every country, poetry comes before prose. It is the oldest language we have — the most primitive, the most elemental and the most natural expression of ourselves as human beings. Poet John Frederick Nims has said that “poetry is the way it is because we are the way we are.”

In “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed,” Emily Dickinson expresses her intoxication with poetry:

I taste a liquor never brewed —

From Tankards scooped in Pearl —

Not all the vats upon the Rhine

Yield such an Alcohol!

Inebriate of Air — am I

And Debauchee of Dew —

Reeling — thro endless summer days —

From inns of Molten Blue.

 While you may never have gotten drunk on poetry, chances are that you have sipped it from time to time. And if the magic and music of the poems have done their work upon you, you have come to see that poetry is a form of expression more concise and concentrated than prose, that the language of poetry exerts a greater pressure per square syllable and a greater intensity per word than any other form of communication.

I invite you to try your hand, mind and heart at writing poetry yourself. Even if you have never created a poem before, you may have sensed that a poem is lurking somewhere inside you, that among the many happenings in your life are some that can best be told in the special language and form of poetry.

A poem “begins in delight and ends in wisdom,” Robert Frost tells us in his delightful and wise essay “The Figure a Poem Makes.” Writing poetry can help you to become more aware of experiences and thoughts that might otherwise seem jumbled and unrelated. Making your own poems can also help you to appreciate poetry more authentically and to see that all human beings are, in their own way, poets.

The American poet and critic William Meredith said, “I expect that hang-gliding must be like poetry. Once you get used to it, you can’t imagine not wanting the scare of it. But it’s more serious than hang-gliding. Poetry is the safest known mode of human existence. You only risk staying alive.” Take the risk. If you come to the adventure of writing poetry with an open mind and heart, willing to hear, willing to see and willing to feel, you will find yourself gliding through an exhilarating journey that begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com verbivore.com

Read the following nursery rhyme and then answer the question posed in the last line:

As I was going to St. Ives,

                        I met a man with seven wives.

                        Every wife had seven sacks.

                        Every sack had seven cats.

                        Every cat had seven kits.

                        Kits, cats, sacks, wives —

                        How many were going to St. Ives?

The answer to the question is one. While the man and his wives and their sacks, cats and kits were going from St. Ives, only the speaker — the I in the rhyme — was going to St. Ives.

If you madly multiplied 7 times 7 times 7 times 7 and added one for the man, you were the victim of a language trap. Language traps are brief posers that test your ability to read or listen carefully and to avoid being fooled by misleading information. If you think precisely as you consider the dozen classic language traps in this game, you can avoid being caught by the snapping shut of steel jaws and being dubbed an April fool.

Answers follow the questions.

1. Name three consecutive days without using the words Wednesday, Friday or Sunday.

2. Susan’s mother had three children. The first child was named April. The second child was named May. What was the third child’s name?

3. There is a clerk at the butcher shop, he is five feet 10 inches tall and he wears size 13 sneakers. What does he weigh?

4. Which is correct: 9 and 7 is 15 or 9 and 7 are 15?

5. How many three-cent stamps are there in a dozen?

6. Pronounce out loud the words formed by each of the following letter series: B-O-A-S-T, C-O-A-S-T, R-O-A-S-T. Now, what do you put in a toaster?

7. Pronounce out loud the words formed by each of the following letter series: B-I-L-K, S-I-L-K. Now, what do cows drink?

8. If a red house is made from red bricks and a blue house is made from blue bricks, what is a greenhouse made of?

9. If a peacock and a half lays an egg and a half in a day and a half, how many eggs will three peacocks lay in three days?

10. How many months have 28 days?

11. A farmer had 17 sheep. All but nine died. How many were left alive?

12. You are the engineer on a train going from Chicago to New York. The train leaves Chicago with a hundred passengers, stops in Detroit to pick up ten and discharge five, stops in Cleveland to pick up five and discharge ten, stops in Buffalo to pick up ten and discharge five, and then proceeds to New York.

How old is the engineer?

Answers

1. yesterday, today, and tomorrow. 2. Susan. 3. meat 4. The sum of 9 and 7 is 16. 5. twelve (i.e., a dozen) 6. bread 7. water 8. glass 9. None. Peacocks don’t lay eggs; peahens do. 10. all of them. 11. nine 12. Because you are the engineer, the age of the engineer is your age.

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com website: verbivore.com.

     — Cassi Fay, Normal Heights

I congratulate Cassi Fay on her penetrating analysis of the epidemic that I have dubbed the Myself Reflex. The most succinct statement that explains why so many speakers and writers misuse, abuse and overuse the pronoun myself comes from Red Smith, the eloquent New York sports writer: “Myself is the foxhole of ignorance where cowards take refuge because they were taught that me is vulgar and I is egotistical.”

In other words, speakers and writers are often addlepated or chickenhearted about choosing the proper cases for their pronouns: the nominative case – I – for subjects and the accusative case – me – for objects. So they cleave to myself as an all-purpose pronoun.

The only three contexts in which myself should ever appear are:

(1) as a reflexive pronoun used as an object of a verb whose subject is the same: “I hurt myself climbing the walls of my home.”

(2) as an intensifier: “I myself wouldn’t be caught dead bungee jumping.”

(3) in special idioms: “I wrote this column all by myself.”

Dear Mr. Lederer: I am sure you have noticed how so many “experts” in radio and television media now refer to people as that: “I know a lady that always wears a hat.” “I have one student that never does his homework” It seems to me in our technologically advanced society, there are so many ways we objectify people (e.g., soldiers are troops). Do you see this language tendency to be symbolic of a greater trend of dehumanizing us? As a high school English teacher, my effort to combat this “trendency” seems to be as futile as trying to empty the ocean with a fork.

     — Tom Strathairn, San Diego

For centuries, that has been used to introduce restrictive adjective clauses that modify human beings, as in Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” But to my ear, that is too distant and impersonal for persons. Stick with who, whom and whose for human beings (and animals who have names) and that and which for things and ideas.

Dear Dr. Lederer: Apropos of your columns on apostrophes, two other judges and I have had an Over-the-Line team named, using some discretion, “The Old Professionals.” On T-shirts we easily spelled out the entire team name, but on the hats and visors we shortened the name to the “Old Pro’s.” In the first incarnation of the team we used what I would consider the correct version on the hat, “Old Pros,” but people always wanted to know “What’s a Pros?” Heck, even the Outlook spellchecker called me on the word Pros. But since there was no possessive intended, we stuck with the correct wording the first year and then cast it aside in future years in favor of the more readable “Old Pro’s.” Only a few of our more literate friends questioned the use of the possessive on a hat with no sentence structure. My question: Is there a grammatical rationale that supports our continuing to use “Old Pro’s,” possessive or not?

     — Ned Huntington, Superior Court Judge (Ret.), San Diego

As an unrepentant Harvard Law School dropout, I am proud to tell His Honor that there is NO rationale for writing the name as “Old Pro’s.” That His Honor’s spellchecker flagged “Old Pros” doesn’t mean it’s wrong. That device is far from infallible. The “prespostrophe” (my word for apostrophe catastrophe) in “Old Pro’s” is unreadable because it looks like a dangling possessive — “Old Pro’s what?” I fervently hope that The Old Professionals will return to being The Old Pros.

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com verbivore.com

What is an Irish bull? I’m glad I asked me that. Some dismiss it as a silly blunder born on the Emerald Isle. Others more tellingly describe an Irish bull as a statement fueled by a delightful absurdity that sparks forth a memorable truth. When asked the difference between an Irish bull and any other kind of bull, Professor John Pentland Mahaffey of Dublin University replied, “An Irish bull is always pregnant,” providing a definition that is itself an example of the form defined.

Among the first and most famous specimens is a pronouncement by Sir Boyle Roche, who once asked, “Why should we do anything to put ourselves out of the way for posterity? What has posterity ever done for us?”

Irish politics, literature and folklore are replete with pronouncements that jump to a confusion:

• An Irishman is never at peace except when he’s fighting.

• An Irishman will die before letting himself be buried outside of Ireland.

• Your Hannar, I was sober enough to know I was dhroonk.

• Gentleman, it appears to be unanimous that we cannot agree.

• Half the lies our opponents tell about us are not true.

• Thank God I’m an atheist.

• Talk about thin! Well, you’re thin, and I’m thin, but he’s as thin as the pair of us put together.

• May you never live to see your wife a widow.

• I can resist anything but temptation.

• Be sure to go to other people’s funerals, or they won’t go to yours.

• This piece is chock full of omissions.

• The cup of Ireland’s misery has been overflowing for centuries and is not yet half full.

• Ireland and England are like two sisters. I would have them embrace like one brother.

• He is the kind of opponent who would stab you in front of your face and then stab you in the chest when your back is turned.

• We should silence anyone who opposes the right to freedom of speech.

• A man cannot be in two places at once, unless he is a bird.

• I marvel at the strength of human weakness.

• God bless the Holy Trinity.

Any implications that the Irish have cornered the bull market are completely unwarranted. Some of the best specimens of taurine eloquence thrive far from the green fields of Ireland. Jazz pianist and composer Eubie Blake smoked from the age of six and refused to drink water. On his hundredth birthday he observed, “If I had known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”

Here are a few more examples of corn-fed American bulls:

• My vision is to make California the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state. – Gov. Gray Davis

• I think that gay marriages are something that should be between a man and a woman. – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger

• There are known knowns. These are things that we know we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know. – Donald Rumsfeld

• We have here two incredibly credible witnesses. – Joe Biden

This is why the sagacious Hobbes, the insightful tiger in the late comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” once predicted that “We can eventually make language a complete impediment to everything.”

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com website: verbivore.com.

Twain held strong opinions about a passel of subjects, and he possessed the gift of being able to state these views in memorable ways: “It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.” “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That is the principal difference between a dog and a man.” He also had a lot to say about style, literature and the American language that he, more than any other writer, helped to shape:

On American English, compared with British English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company, and we own the bulk of the shares.

On dialects. I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.

On choosing words. The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter— ‘tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

More on word choice. A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader’s way and makes it plain. A close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and rejoice in it as we do when the right word blazes out at us. Whenever we come upon of these intensely right words in book or a newspaper, the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt. It tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn butter that creams the sumac berry.

On style (in a letter to a 12-year-old boy). 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; and 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.

On using short words. I never write metropolis for seven cents when I get the same for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same for cop.

On the first-person-plural pronoun. Only presidents, editors and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use the editorial we.

On clichés. Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him,

On grammar. Perfect grammar — persistent, continuous, sustained — is the fourth dimension, so to speak. Many have sought it, but none has found it.

On spelling reform. Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.

On literature. A classic is something that everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to  read.

On reading. The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.

On dictionaries. A dictionary is the most awe-inspiring of all books; it knows so much. . . . It has gone around the sun, and spied out everything and lit it up.

On speaking. It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

On writing humor. There are several kinds of stories but only one difficult kind — the humorous.

Please send your questions and comments about language to richard.lederer@utsandiego.com website: www.verbivore.com.