Jacques Barzun
French historian
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
I regret that you want to discard wiretap. You lend aid to the fallacious notion that the use of every new gadget for an old purpose must get a new name. Doing that regularly would be distracting, and the quality of the perpetual replacements would be dubious. ... The fallacy behind perpetual recoinage is to suppose that words must describe instead of stand for and evoke. For a reasonably stable language, words must continue to cover new details, and they can: we ship goods by truck and plane. We have cash in the bank though it is only a balance and not even written down. The bath room has only a shower stall. The table and bed linen are of cotton thread with some plastic intertwined. A lecture is not necessarily read. I am typing on a computer that uses no type.
—Jacques Barzun, French historian, The New York Times, March 19, 2006
Posted on March 21, 2006 at 5:51 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The language has less to fear from the crude vulnerabilities of the untaught than the blithe irresponsibility of the taught.
—Jacques Barzun, French historian
Posted on January 9, 2001 at 11:01 AM
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