IT is flattering to be recognised in a library. Two students — one of them a police SHO anxious to become a DMG officer — asked me for advice on how they could improve their writing skills. It was a question I asked myself 60 years ago.
What better suggestion could one make except to point them towards masters like Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, or V.S. Naipaul? Maugham believed that “writing should be simple enough to be read with ease, and the manner should fit the matter as a well-cut shoe fits a shapely foot”. Hemingway (a Nobel laureate) never forgot the rules he learned as a cub reporter: use short sentences. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative. Eliminate every superfluous word.
Naipaul (another laureate) espoused nine rules, among them: write sentences of no more than 10 or 12 words. Each sentence should add to the statement that went before. A good paragraph is a series of clear, linked statements. [Churchill suggested that paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.] Avoid big words when succinct ones will do. Avoid adjectives, except those of colour, size and number. Always go for the concrete, never the abstract. Practice every day.
Not everyone has the poet Dom Moraes’s talent of “taking the word from the stream, fighting the sand for speech”. It helps to have a good dictionary and a well-researched thesaurus of quotations. Borrowing from better writers is not plagiarism; good writers expect to be quoted.
It helps to have a good dictionary and a well-researched thesaurus.
It was by reading hundreds of books that, in the 18th century, Dr Samuel Johnson was able to cull 42,773 entries with supporting references for his seminal dictionary. Many of Dr Johnson’s definitions are amusing, if unrepeatable in England or Scotland today, eg “Oats: A grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”
Nearly 170 years later, Dr James Murray undertook to assemble a new English dictionary, now the Oxford English Dictionary. The final results were published in 1928, after his death. Twelve volumes contained 414,825 definitions with 1,827,306 citations. Both the Oxford and Dr Johnson’s dictionaries reflected current usage. For example, the word ‘harridan’ in Dr Johnson’s day referred to a ‘decayed strumpet’. The OED refined it to the more genteel ‘a bad-tempered old woman’.
The OED is best consulted on a needs basis. Others have an identity and appeal of their own. One which has lost its utility but not its charm in this postcolonial time is Hobson-Jobson: An Anglo-Indian Dictionary. Hobson-Jobson stood for an Anglicised
Ya Hasan! Ya Hussain!
The product of a collaboration between A. Burnell and H. Yule, it was published in 1886. It contained 2,000 entries with citations, eg an Ag-gari meant a train; a Binky-Nabob a Commandant of Artillery, and a dharna dena or baithna was a mode of extorting payment by sitting at a debtor’s door, and remaining there until the debt had been redeemed.
Hobson-Johnson quotes the Mughal emperor Babar’s description of Afghans, who “reduced to extremities in war, come into the presence of their enemy with grass between their teeth; being as much as to say, ‘I am your ox.’” At least then, the Afghans had grass. The Russians and the Allied Forces denied them even that.
Ambrose ‘Bitter’ Bierce, a 19th-century lexicographer, compiled an acidic work known as The Devil’s Dictionary (1906). Ambrose was the youngest in a family of 10. Their father, with scant regard for the gamut of the alphabet, gave all of them names that began with the letter ’A’ — Abigail, etc to Ambrose.
It took Ambrose seven years to assemble and publish his dictionary. Among his memorable definitions are a kleptomaniac (‘A rich thief’), a saint (‘A dead sinner, revised and edited’), or litigation (‘A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage’). An American, he defined anyone un-American mischievously as ‘wicked, intolerable, heathenish’. Bierce also modified Johnson’s earlier aphorism regarding patriotism to be the first, not the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Here, in 1950, Hakeem Ahmed Shujaa as secretary of the Official Language Committee published an Urdu translation of Official Terms and Phraseology. Released in loose-leaf form, it provided for future additions. It anticipated bureaucratic bribery by including it in its first and only edition.
Upwardly mobile civil servants might also benefit from James Lipton’s inimitable volume of collective nouns: An Exaltation of Larks (1968). Who has not sought a word to describe a group of anything? Lipton has an answer for most: A Recession of Economists; A Skim of Embezzlers; and in the context of US politics, An Inflation of Democrats and a Deficit of Republicans.
And for writers of weekly op-eds? A Pique of Political Columnists.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, September 5th, 2024
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