thoughts and feelings instead of those which are sharply and specifically ours.  Unless, therefore, you wish your intellectual processes to be as hazy and haphazard as those of mental shirkers and loafers, you must eschew, not necessarily all slang, but all heedless, all habitual use of it.  Now and then a touch of slang, judiciously chosen, is effective; now and then it fulfils a legitimate purpose of language.  But normally you should express yourself as befits one who has at his disposal the rich treasuries of the dictionary instead of a mere stock of greasy counterfeit phrases.

EXERCISE — Slovenliness IV

Replace the following slang with acceptable English: 

We pulled a new wrinkle. 
He’s an easy mark. 
Oh, you’re nutty. 
Beat it. 
I have all the inside dope. 
You can’t bamboozle me. 
What a phiz the bloke has! 
You’re talking through your hat. 
We had a long confab with the gink. 
He’s loony over that chicken. 
The prof. told us to vamoose. 
Take a squint at the girl with the specs. 
Ain’t it fierce the way they swipe umbrellas? 
Goodnight, how she claws the ivory! 
Nix on the rough stuff. 
And there I got pinched by a cop for parking my Tin Lizzie.

Wordiness

As a precaution against tameness you should cultivate spontaneity and daring.  As a precaution against slovenliness you should cultivate freshness and accuracy.  But to display spontaneity, daring, freshness, accuracy you must have or acquire a large stock, a wide range, of words.  Now this possession, like any other, brings with it temptation.  If we have words, we like to use them.  Nor do we wait for an indulgence in this luxury until we have consciously set to work to amass a vocabulary.

Verbosity is, in truth, the besetting linguistic sin.  Most people are lavish with words, as most people are lavish with money.  This is not to say that in the currency of language they are rich.  But even if they lack the means—­and the desire—­to be extravagant, they yet make their purchases heedlessly or fail to count their linguistic change.  The degree of our thrift, not the amount of our income or resources, is what marks us as being or not being verbal spendthrifts.  The frugal manager buys his ideas at exactly the purchase price.  He does not expend a twenty-dollar bill for a box of matches.

Have words by all means, the more of them the better, but use them temperately, sparingly.  Do not think that a passage to be admirable must be studded with ostentatious terms.  Consider the Gettysburg Address or the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  These convey their thought and feeling perfectly, yet both are simple—­exquisitely simple.  They strike us indeed as being inevitable—­as if their phrasing could not have been other than it is.  They have, they are, finality.  What could glittering phraseology add to them?  Nothing; it could only mar them.  Yet Lincoln and the Scriptural writers were not afraid to use big words when occasion required.  What they sought was to make their speech adequate without carrying a superfluous syllable.