Education: The Danger of Dufferism

Historian Jacques Barzun of Columbia University is one professor who does not mind getting from his window cleaner a note like this: “The windows have been cleaned Wed. 12:30 p.m. Your maid was their to veryfey the statement.” That sort of thing, says Barzun in the Atlantic Monthly, may be bad writing, but it is nevertheless harmless. The real danger to language “does not come from such trifles. It comes rather from the college-bred millions who . . . circulate the prevailing mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax that passes for prose.” Barzun calls this “the infinite duplication of dufferism . . .

“During the last hundred years, nearly every intellectual force has worked, in all innocence, against language. The strongest, science and technology, did two damaging things: they poured quantities of awkward new words into the language and this in turn persuaded everybody that each new thing must have a name, preferably ‘scientific.’ These new words . . . were fashioned to impress, an air of profundity being imparted by the particularly scientific letters k, x and o = Kodak, Kleenex, Sapolio. The new technological words were sinful hybrids like ‘electrocute,’ or misunderstood phrases like ‘personal equation,’ ‘nth degree,’ or ‘psychological moment’—brain addlers of the greatest potency . . .”

The Race. “Under the spate of awe-inspiring vocables, the layman naturally felt that he too must dignify his doings and not be left behind in the race for prestige. Common acts must suggest a technical process. Thus we get ‘contact’ and ‘funnel’ as workaday verbs—and ‘process’ itself: ‘we’ll process your application’ —as if it were necessary to name the steps or choices of daily life with scientific generality . . . The power of words over nature, which has played such a role in human history, is now an exploded belief, a dead emotion. Far from words controlling things, it is now things that dictate words. As soon as science was able to chop up the physical world and recombine it in new forms, language followed suit . . .

“The predominant fault of the bad English encountered today is not the crude vulgarism of the untaught but the blithe irresponsibility of the taught. The language is no longer regarded as a common treasure to be hoarded and protected as far as possible. Rather, it is loot . . . to be played with, squandered, plastered on for one’s adornment. Literary words imperfectly grasped, meanings assumed from bare inspection, monsters spawned for a trivial cause—these are but a few of the signs of squandering . . . The advertiser bids you ‘slip your feet into these easygoing leisuals and breathe a sigh of real comfort’ . . . The New Yorker spotted a movie theater sign on which ‘adultery’ was used to mean ‘adulthood.’ From an English periodical I learn that some new houses ‘affront the opposite side of the street.’ If Mrs. Malaprop is going to become the patron saint of English, what is going to prevent ‘contention’ from meaning the same thing as ‘contentment’ or the maker of woodcuts from being called a woodcutter?”

The Remedy. The cure for all this, says Barzun, is self-denial. “As many of us as possible must work out of our system, first, all the vogue words that almost always mean nothing but temporary vacancy of mind—such words as ‘basic;5 ‘major,’ ‘over-all,’ ‘personal,’ ‘values,’ ‘exciting’ (everything from a new handbag to a new baby) ; then . . . all the tribal adornments which, being cast off, may disclose the plain man we would like to be: no frames of reference, field theories, or apperception protocols; no texture, prior to, or in terms of; and the least amount of coordination, dynamics, and concepts.”

Unfortunately, adds Barzun. the people who could do most to help—the teachers and professors—are often the worst offenders. “Suppose the teacher of a course on family life has just been reading Social Casework and his mind is irradiated with this: ‘Familial societality is already a settled question biologically, structured in our inherited bodies and physiology, but the answer to those other questions are not yet safely and irrevocably anatomized.’ Unless this is immediately thrown up like the nux vomica it is, it will contaminate everybody it touches, from pupil to public—in fact the whole blooming familial societality.”