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SHARETEXT™
Less Than Words Can Say 
Page 1
Richard Mitchell is trying to stay awake.What’s putting him, and all of us to sleep?“Insubstantial words, hazy and disembodied,[that] have fled utterly from things and ideas.”In
 Less Than Words Can Say
, Mitchell wakeseverybody up with the most devastating exposé todate of our rampant misuse of English. A DonQuixote—Savonarola might be more apt—of language, he wages war on its perverters, fromteachers and deans to politicians and bureaucrats,whose consistently overblown prose offers usinanity in the guise of wisdom.“Words never fail,” Mitchell declares—andinane words never fail to damage the brain. Alltoo often, words are used imprecisely byadministrators and bureaucrats, as unintelligiblepublic documents, oblique grant proposals, andpretentious administrative memoranda attest.Mitchell’s cantankerous crusade indictsgovernment agency “chairs” for the intimidatingand obfuscating “legalese” of their profession,obsequious grant-seekers who supplicatefoundations in time-honored cant, and aspiringacademics who speak in the Divine Passive.According to Mitchell, this bureaucratic jargon is turning us into a nation of baffled, inept,frustrated, and—ultimately—violent people, andthe public schools are to blame. For the pastthirty-five years, they have taught children tosocialize rather than to read, write, and cipher—the only disciplines that foster clear language andlogical thought. Mitchell’s alarming conclusion isthat our schools are turning out illiterates who willnever manage their lives—because, lacking “thepower of language,” they can’t think.Richard Mitchell is a professor of English atGlassboro State College and editor and publisherof the controversial monthly publication
TheUnderground Grammarian
.“Richard Mitchell objects to renaming libraries‘learning resource centers.’ That is an example of his clear thinking. If English is saved, he will beone of its saviors.”—Edwin Newman“
 Less Than Words Can Say
is by far the mostentertaining, intelligent, and above all, the mostimportant work on the deplorable state of American English I have read, and I have readmany.”—Thomas H. Middleton“Richard Mitchell has the courage to write well—an even rarer courage now that sloppy thought isequated with democratic virtue. His own proseillustrates the qualities and habits of mind oureducationists don’t want our children to develop:wit, clarity, precision, mastery of detail,intellectual self-respect, and contempt forcharlatans. —J. Mitchell Morse.“I, too, have been there…and , too, have railed atthe gobbledygook and nonsense of pedagoguese….I hope it [
 Less Than Words CanSay
] finds its way into all the bureaucratic mazesof our land.” —Bel Kaufman“The wittiest, the most brilliant and, probably themost penetrating discussion now available of ourgrowing American illiteracy. This book must beread
at once
, in the short time that remains beforeall of us become incapable of reading andwriting.”—Clifton Fadiman
 
SHARETEXT™
Less Than Words Can Say 
Page 2
Foreword
A colleague sent me a questionnaire. It wasabout my goals in teaching, and it asked me toassign values to a number of beautiful andinspiring goals. I was told that the goals werepretty widely shared by professors all around thecountry.Many years earlier I had returned a similarquestionnaire, because the man who sent it hadpromised, in writing, to “analize” my “input.”That seemed appropriate, so I put it in. But hedidn’t do as he had promised, and I had lost allinterest in questionnaires.This one intrigued me, however, because it waslofty. It spoke of a basic appreciation of the liberalarts, a critical evaluation of society, emotionaldevelopment, creative capacities, students’ self-understanding, moral character, interpersonalrelations and group participation, and generalinsight into the knowledge of a discipline.Unexceptionable goals, every one. Yet it seemedto me, on reflection, that they were none of mydamned business. It seemed possible, even likely,that some of those things might flow from thestudy of language and literature, which is mydamned business, but they also might not. Somevery well-read people lack moral character andshow no creative capacities at all, to say nothingof self-understanding or a basic appreciation of the liberal arts. So, instead of answering thequestionnaire, I paid attention to its language; andI began by asking myself how “interpersonalrelations” were different from “relations.” Surely,I thought, our relations with domestic animals andedible plants were not at issue here; why specifythem as “interpersonal”? And how else can we“participate” but in groups? I couldn’t answer.I asked further how a “basic” appreciation wasto be distinguished from some other kind of appreciation. I recalled that some of mycolleagues were in the business of 
teaching
appreciation. It seemed all too possible that theywould have specialized their labors, some of themteaching elementary appreciation and othersintermediate appreciation, leaving to the mostexalted members of the department the seniorseminars in advanced appreciation, but even thatdidn’t help with basic appreciation. It made aboutas much sense as blue appreciation.As I mulled this over, my eye fell on the sameword in the covering letter, which said, “Wewould appreciate having you respond to theseitems.” Would they, could they, “basicallyappreciate” having me respond to these items?Yes, I think they could. And what is theappropriate response to an item? Would it be abasic response?Suddenly I couldn’t understand anything. Inoticed, as though for the first time, that thecovering letter promised “to complete the goalsand objectives aspect of the report.” What is agoals aspect? An objectives aspect? How do youcomplete an aspect? How seriously could I take amere aspect, when my mind was beguiled by thepossibility of a basic aspect? Even of a basic goalsand basic objectives basic aspect?After years of fussing about the pathetic, baffledlanguage of students, I realized that it was not intheir labored writings that bad language dwelt.
This
, this inane gabble, this was bad language.Evil language. Here was a man taking the publicmoney for the work of his mind and darkeningcounsel by words without understanding.Words never fail. We hear them, we read them;they enter into the mind and become part of us foras long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to hisfellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouthsinanity disorders thought for all who listen. Theremust be some minimum allowable dose of inanitybeyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable.Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner orlater must seep into all the tissues of thought.This man had offered me inanity. I had almostseized it. If I told you that this little book wouldprovide you with general insight into theknowledge of a discipline, would you read on? If so, then you had
better 
read on, for you are indanger. People all around you are offering inanity,and you are ready to seize it, like any well-behaved American consumer dutifully swallowingthe best advertised pill. You are, in a certainsense, unconscious.Language is the medium in which we areconscious. The speechless beasts are aware, butthey are not conscious. To be conscious is to“know with” something, and a language of somesort is the device with which we know. More
 
SHARETEXT™
Less Than Words Can Say 
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precisely, it is the device with which we
can
know. We don’t have to. We can, if we please,speak of general insight into the knowledge of adiscipline and forgo knowing.Consciousness has degrees. We can be wideawake or sound asleep. We can be anesthetized.He is not fully conscious who can speak lightly of such things as basic appreciations and generalinsights into the knowledge of a discipline. Hewanders in the twilight sleep of knowing whereinsubstantial words, hazy and disembodied, havefled utterly from things and ideas. His is anattractive world, dreamy and undemanding, aLotus-land of dozing addicts. They blow a littlesmoke our way. It smells good. Suddenly andhappily we realize that our creative capacities andself-understanding yearn after basic appreciationsand general insights. We nod, we drowse, we fallasleep.I am trying to stay awake.
Chapter One
The Worm in the Brain
There’s an outrageous but entertaining assertionabout language and the human brain in CarlSagan’s
 Dragons of Eden
. It is possible, Sagansays, to damage the brain in precisely such a waythat the victim will lose the ability to understandthe passive or to devise prepositional phrases orsomething like that. No cases are cited,unfortunately—it would be fun to chat with somevictim—but the whole idea is attractive, becauseif it were true it would explain many things. Infact, I can think of no better way to account forsomething that happened to a friend of mine—andprobably to one of yours too.He was an engaging chap, albeit serious. We didsome work together—well, not exactly work,committee stuff—and he used to send me a notewhenever there was to be a meeting. Somethinglike this: “Let’s meet next Monday at two o’clock,OK?” I was always delighted to read such perfectprose.Unbeknownst to us all, however, something washappening in that man’s brain. Who can say what?Perhaps a sleeping genetic defect was stirring,perhaps some tiny creature had entered in theporches of his ear and was gnawing out a home inhis cranium. We’ll never know. Whatever it was,it had, little by little, two effects. At one and thesame time, he discovered in himself the yearningto be an assistant dean pro tem, and he began tolose the power of his prose. Ordinary opinion, upto now, has always held that one of these things,either one, was the cause of the other. Now wecan at last guess the full horror of the truth.
 Both
are symptoms of serious trouble in the brain.Like one of these Poe characters whose friendsare all doomed, I watched, helpless, the inexorableprogress of the disease. Gradually but inevitablymy friend was being eaten from within. In thesame week that saw his application for the newlycreated post of assistant dean pro tem, he sent methe following message: “This is to inform you thatthere’ll be a meeting next Monday at 2:00.” Evenworse, much worse, was to come.A week or so later it was noised about that hewould indeed take up next semester a new careeras a high-ranking assistant dean pro tem. I wasactually writing him a note of congratulationwhen the campus mail brought me what was to behis last announcement of a meeting of ourcommittee. Hereafter he would be frying fatterfish, but he wanted to finish the business at hand.His note read: “Please be informed that theCommittee on Memorial Plaques will meet onMonday at 2:00.”I walked slowly to the window, his note in myhand, and stared for a while at the quad. The oak trees there had been decimated not long before bya leak in an underground gas line. The seepingpoison had killed their very roots, but they had atleast ended up as free firewood for the faculty.Pangloss might have been right, after all, and,calamity that it was, this latest message spared methe trouble of writing the congratulatory note andeven afforded me a glimpse of a remarkablyattractive young lady straying dryad-fashionthrough the surviving oaks. Things balance out.You would think, wouldn’t you, that the wormor whatever had at last done its work, that thepoor fellow’s Hydification was complete and hisdestruction assured. No. It is a happy mercy thatmost of us cannot begin to imagine the full horrorof these ravaging disorders. To this day that manstill sends out little announcements and memosabout this and that. They begin like this: “You are
of 00

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