A Word In Your Ear And Just Another Word

A WORD IN YOUR EAR AND JUST ANOTHER WORD by IVOR BROWN With a Foreword to the American Edition by, DONALD ADAMS IN TWO PARTS E. P. BUTTON COMPANY, INC. New York, 1945 FOREWORD TO THE AMERICAN EDITION THIS is a good time to think about words. During wars, and immediately after them, words, and particularly those that stand for big and ideal concepts, are likely to have a hollow sound and to have grown fuzzy and frayed at the edges, if not a little rotten at the heart. Words, except the simplest and most direct, are not much good in time of war, and yet we are pelted with them to an even greater degree than in the intervals of peace. However much we may talk about them as weapons, when armies are on the march and the earth shakes, words assume a triviality which belies their true nature. They have a lot to do with making wars, but not much, I fear, with winning them. The best kind of words in war are like these of Field Marshal Montgomery I am never anxious when I fight my battles. If I am anxious, I dont fight them. I wait until I am ready. Or words like those of Marshal Foch They shall not pass, or of the American submarine commander who quietly ordered, Take her down, before the seas washed over him. But if it is better to be sparing in their use when there is grim work to be done, it is well to be thinking about them and the power which they have when the guns are silent. And not alone the power which they hold, but the delight which they can give. I can think of no other medium of communication or, indeed, any other expression of mans creative spirit, in which delicacy and strength, explosive force and soothing assurance are as remark ably combined as they are in words. Nothing, surely, is more alive than a word. They are mans purest creations, of a visible or audible kind. They depend not at all upon material aids for their effectiveness, as do all other fruits of the human mind. Architecture, painting, sculpture, 6O16i. i music, science all demand a material intermediary of some sort words alone are as disembodied as when man first plucked them from the air. Nothing in mans progress from his bestial beginnings seems to me as fascinating, as teasing to the mind, as the process by which he developed these counters for his thought. All of us who use them as tools in our work must some times pause to ponder over their beginnings and to wonder over the frequently brilliant suggestiveness of the symbols chosen by those remote ancestors of ours who looked with fresh eyes upon the phenomena of nature and sought to find in speech sounds that would convey appropriately what they saw. How admirably and how often they succeeded And I think the coiners of Anglo-Saxon speech were uncommonly gifted in that respect, though it is enormously difficult to compare the quality of a word in ones own tongue with that of another, because of the long and intimate, deeply imbedded associations of the native word. Yet, think of words like dawn and dusk They are beauti ful in themselves, and still, after long centuries of wide and continual use, untouched by time, fresh as the, day when they were minted. There is slowly spreading light in the word dawn, both in the sound and the look of it. And the soft and stealthy darkening that is conveyed by dusk is not merely the mental reflex occasioned by the sight or sound of the accustomed symbol. As you look at it, as you hear it, you areaware of the perfect appropriateness of the word. So too, is thunder one of the most evocative words in the language. And though Donner in German, grom ih Russian, and tonnerre in French are good too, is not thunder the best of the four It seems to me to have more reverberation in its sound than the others Another excellent word of this kind is the Russian prostor, for which there is no real equivalent in English, French or German...