and shaved it down till the average is three letters and a half. I can
put one thousand and two hundred words on your page, and there’s not
another man alive that can come within two hundred of it. My page is
worth eighty-four dollars to me. It takes exactly as long to fill your
magazine page with long words as it does with short ones-four hours.
Now, then, look at the criminal injustice of this requirement of yours.
I am careful, I am economical of my time and labor. For the family’s
sake I’ve got to be so. So I never write ‘metropolis’ for seven cents,
because I can get the same money for ‘city.’ I never write ‘policeman,’
because I can get the same price for ‘cop.’ And so on and so on. I never
write ‘valetudinarian’ at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can
humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents;
I wouldn’t do it for fifteen. Examine your obscene text, please; count
the words.”
He counted and said it was twenty-four. I asked him to count the
letters. He made it two hundred and three.
I said, “Now, I hope you see the whole size of your crime. With my
vocabulary I would make sixty words out of those two hundred and five
letters, and get four dollars and twenty cents for it; whereas for your
inhuman twenty-four I would get only one dollar and sixty-eight cents.
Ten pages of these sky-scrapers of yours would pay me only about three
hundred dollars; in my simplified vocabulary the same space and the same
labor would pay me eight hundred and forty dollars. I do not wish to
work upon this scandalous job by the piece. I want to be hired by the
year.” He coldly refused. I said:
“Then for the sake of the family, if you have no feeling for me, you
ought at least to allow me overtime on that word extemporaneousness.”
Again he coldly refused. I seldom say a harsh word to any one, but I was
not master of myself then, and I spoke right out and called him an
anisodactylous plesiosaurian conchyliaceous Ornithorhyncus, and rotten to
the heart with holoaophotal subterranean extemporaneousness. God forgive
me for that wanton crime; he lived only two hours.
From that day to this I have been a devoted and hard-working member of
the heaven-born institution, the International Association for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Authors, and now I am laboring with Carnegie’s
Simplified Committee, and with my heart in the work . . . .
Now then, let us look at this mighty question reasonably, rationally,
sanely–yes, and calmly, not excitedly. What is the real function, the
essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn’t it merely
to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with
words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome
forms? But can we? Yes. I hold in my hand the proof of it. Here is a
letter written by a woman, right out of her heart of hearts. I think she
never saw a spelling-book in her life. The spelling is her own. There
isn’t a waste letter in it anywhere. It reduces the fonetics to the last
gasp–it squeezes the surplusage out of every word–there’s no spelling
that can begin with it on this planet outside of the White House. And as
for the punctuation, there isn’t any. It is all one sentence, eagerly
and breathlessly uttered, without break or pause in it anywhere. The
letter is absolutely genuine–I have the proofs of that in my possession.
I can’t stop to spell the words for you, but you can take the letter
presently and comfort your eyes with it. I will read the letter:
“Miss dear freind I took some Close into the armerry and give them to you
to Send too the suffrers out to California and i Hate to treble you but i
got to have one of them Back it was a black oll wolle Shevyott With a
jacket to Mach trimed Kind of Fancy no 38 Burst measure and palsy