The Lancet of Language

Caricature by William Auerbach-Levy

“I’m delighted with a story James Hilton told me the other day about a history exam in Oxford,” confided Alexander Woollcott to his intimate friends, those six million people who listened to his 1930s Town Crier broadcasts on CBS radio.

“In answer to the question, ‘What do you know about the Lombard League?’ one of the students correctly wrote down the word, ‘Nothing.’ For that, the examiners were about to give him a zero when they had the grace to realize that the real error lay in the sloppiness of the question. So they gave him full credit.

“I was delighted by that story because in matters of speech, it’s not elegance that interests me but exactness. Precision. Surgical precision.

“I suggest that those of us whose trade is in words, whether put down on paper or tossed into the patient airwaves, and all those whose job it is to teach that trade, might better concentrate on the really grievous injury done to our medium every day by those who so ignore the primal, eldest meaning of a word that eventually it loses its sharp edge as an instrument, its exact value as currency.”

Woollcott went on to illustrate with the meaning of the words “prone” and “supine” — terms that were even then becoming pointlessly indistinguishable, but had originally been usefully sharp and distinct.

Source: “Smart Aleck: The Wit, World and Life of Alexander Woollcott” by Howard Teichmann