Although there are not yet ration cards for words, it is impossible to use now quite as many of them as one would like to print, and here are a few that Mr. Ivor Brown thinks might be axed with advantage.
The further "slimming" of our journals. owing to shortage of material, and the general necessity for cutting down all use of print and paper will doubtless increase the habit of writing in "telegraphese." with its ugly tricks, especially that of dropping the article before nouns. This kind of brevity catches the eye and gives a brisk impression of a lively fellow behind the typewriter but in fact it usually turns out that the writer, having saved five letters by omitting an "an" and a "the" proceeds to waste twenty or thirty by introducing some tired, familiar. worthless adjective: what we save on the cuts we lose on the cliches. Why continue, for example, to call a thud sickening or a silence stony? Do not the nouns suffice?
"Sickening thud." by the way, appears to have no august parentage in Shakespeare or any other famous author, as so many of our more popular cliches do. Mr. Eric Partridge, the untiring lexicographer of our time, in his newly published "Dictionary of Clichés" tells us that "sickening thud" arrived about 1910 It was vivid when it came and it would be grimly accurate and effective now as a description of a bomb-bump heard at a distance. But the epithet has been so overworked as to become a mere cipher. If all thuds are sickening, then none sickens.
"Stony silence" on which Mr. Partridge omits to comment. is even more absurd. A stone in isolation is no more silent than a piece of cloth: when struck or trodden on stones are
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.