Studies in Words finished

I have to admit I skipped the middle 7 chapters of this book. They were the actual meat of what Mr. Lewis wanted to discuss. Each of those chapters took a word and discussed its meaning through time and the Latin and Greek equivalents of those words and discussed how they were the same or different. I tried to read a few, but I was really not interested. His final chapter, however, was much more interesting. It is called "On the Fringe of Language." In it he discusses how we use words as insults, or just emotional expression, and they have lost meaning.
"Another limitation of language is that it cannot, unlike music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However, the words in a great poet's phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly speaking, each word must be read or heard before the next. That way, language is as unilinear as time."

"One of the first things we have to say to a beginner (writer) ... is 'avoid all epithets which are merely emotional. It is no use telling us that something was "mysterious" or "loathsome" or "awe-inspiring" or "voluptuous." Do you think your readers will believe you just because you say so? You must go quite a different way to work. By direct description, by metaphor and simile, by secretly evoking powerful associations, by offering the right stimuli to our nerves (in the right degree and the right order), and by the very beat and vowel melody and length and brevity of your sentences, you must bring it about that we, readers, not you, exclaim, "How mysterious!" or "How loathsome!" Let me taste for myself and you'll have no need to tell me how I should react to the flavor.'
I love this paragraph because he states precisely what I feel, but cannot put into words, especially as eloquently as he does. Great advice as a tutor.

He goes on to tell us that there are exceptions...

'Which, to the boundaries of space and time,
Of melancholy space and doleful time,

He points out that in this poem, Donne reverses the process. "The object (space and time) is in one way so familiar to our imaginations, and in another so unimaginable - we have read so many tedious attempts to exalt or over-awe us with mere superlatives or even with simple arithmetic - That nothing can be made of it. This time...the poet appeals directly to our emotions; and not obvious ones." So true when those simple overused adjectives don't do something justice. Melancholy and doleful.

Next he discusses words that are merely emotional and have lost meaning (remember verbicide?)
He cites damn as an example, "historically the whole Christian eschatology lies behind them. If no one had ever consigned his enemy to the eternal fires and believed that there were eternal fires to receive him, these ejaculations would never have existed. But inflation, the spontaneous hyperboles of ill-temper, and the decay of religion, have long since emptied them of that lurid content. Those who have no belief in damnation - and some who have - now damn inanimate objects which would on any view be ineligible for it. The word is no longer an imprecation. It is hardly, in the full sense, a word at all when so used. Its popularity probably owes as much to its resounding phonetic virtues as to any, even fanciful, association with hell. It has ceased to be profane. It has also become very much less forceful."

Here he discusses calling someone names, such as swine or pig. "But his language as such has very little power to do the only thing it is intended to do. It would have been far more wounding to be called swine when the word still carried some whiff of the sty and some echo of a grunt; far more wounding to be called a villain when this still conjured up an image of the unwashed, malodorous, ineducable, gross, belching, close-fisted and surly boor. Now, who cares? Language meant solely to hurt hurts strangely little."
I love the way he writes. I must admit I am surprised, as I often have been, that people felt this way, even way back then (1960).
"When words of abuse have hurting the enemy as their direct and only object, they do not hurt him much."

"As words become exclusively emotional they cease to be words and therefore cease to perform any strictly linguistic function. They operate as growls, or barks, or tears."

"The function of criticism is to get ourselves out of the way and let humanity decide. Not to discharge our hatred, but to expose the grounds for it; not to vilify faults, but to diagnose and exhibit them. Unfortunately to express our hatred and to revenge ourselves is easier and more agreeable. Hence, there is a tendency to select our pejorative epithets with a view not to their accuracy, but to their power of hurting." Do we want to "inform the reader or annoy the author?"

He talks about a book critic: "In the first hundred words the critic had revealed his passions. What happened to me after that is, I think, what must happen to anybody in such circumstances. Automatically, without thinking about it, willy-nilly, one's mind discounts everything he says, as it does when we are listening to a drunk or delirious man. Indeed we cannot even think about the book under discussion. The critic rivets our attention on himself."

This could be applied to other situations such as political pundits, or any time someone is offering up an opinion about a subject.
The lesson? "The very occasions on which we should most like to write a slashing review are precisely those on which we had much better hold our tongues. The very desire is a danger signal."

And that's it for that book. I'll just go and erase my pencil marks and return this dusty old tome to the library.