I said, “You want ten pages of those rumbling, great, long, summer thunderpeals, and you expect to get them at seven cents a peal?”

He said, “A word’s a word, and seven cents is the contract; what are you going to do about it?”

I said, “Jackson, this is cold-blooded oppression.  What’s an average English word?”

He said, “Six letters.”

I said, “Nothing of the kind; that’s French, and includes the spaces between the words; an average English word is four letters and a half.  By hard, honest labor I’ve dug all the large words out of my vocabulary 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 . . . .