After-Orts #33

   Most of us — almost all — must take in and give out language as we do breath, and we had better consider the seriousness of language pollution as second only to air pollution. For the linguistically disciplined, to misuse or mispronounce a word is an unnecessary and unhealthy contribution to the surrounding smog. To have taught ourselves not to do this, or — being human and thus also imperfect — to do it as little as possible, means deriving from every speaking moment the satisfaction we get from a cap that snaps on to a container perfectly, an elevator that stops flush with the landing, a roulette ball that comes to rest exactly on the number on which we have placed our bet. It gives us the pleasure of hearing or seeing our words — because they are abiding by the rules — snapping, sliding, falling precisely into place, expressing with perfect lucidity and symmetry just what we wanted them to express. This is comparable to the satisfaction of the athlete or ballet dancer or pianist finding his body or legs or fingers doing his bidding with unimpeachable accuracy.
     — John Simon, in Why Good English Is Good For You, the closing essay in his collection Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and its Decline


. . . oxygen, however essential to aeronautics and snorkeling, is death to the creative process . . .
     — S. J. Perelman, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mime 


The ingenuity of self-deception is inexhaustible.
     — Hannah More  (1745-1833)