Simple

"A demagog and a pedagog wrote a prolog for a catalog. When thru, tho, they recited the Decalog in the thorofare." Thus would it be written by members and followers of the Simplified Spelling Board, which held its 19th annual meeting, last week, in Manhattan.

Items from the business of the meeting:

1) A newspaper syndicate with papers in 31 states had adopted the practice of clipping unnecessary "ugh's" and "ue's" from words such as those in the sample sentence above.

2) The Board's monthly bulletin, Spelling, discontinued in 1918, would resume publication.

3) Re-election of the following officials : Charles H. Grandgent, President; Gano Dunn, Chairman of the Board of Trustees; Henry Gallup Paine, Treasurer; Godfrey Dewey, Secretary; Irving T. Fisher, William T. Foster, David Starr Jordan, Alexander H. MacKay, Brander Matthews, William F. MacLean, Homer H. Seerley, Frank W. Taussig, Vice Presidents.

Proponents of simplified spelling argue that it is illogical to use superfluous letters to express simple sounds. They argue also economy of effort in learning and writing. Opponents argue that simplified spelling makes words "ugly," that derivations are obscured.

Though phonetics is the basis of simplified spelling, the Board has gone by no means as far as one of its oldest members, Melvil Dewey of Lake Placid, N. Y., believes the movement could be carried. Mr. Dewey employs phonetics with painstaking, sometimes cryptic thoroughness. At the Lake Placid Club, of which he is President, guests are familiar with such items as the following on his bill of fare: "krem of whet," "kofe," "fryd egz," "frut," "kak," "yc krem." In a letter apropos of articles on simple spelling, Mr. Dewey once wrote: "My sugjestion wud be a first articl as long as yu think wize that wud be folod now and then by short one. . . ." In this sentence, the word "long," instead of ending with an "ng," was terminated by a symbol similar in shape to a Greek "eta," standing for both letters at once, which Mr. Dewey had evidently had mounted specially on his typewriter.

Father to Son

Years hence, the "Personal Letters of Calvin Coolidge" are likely to be syndicated to the newspapers, published in book form, relegated to library stacks, listed in scholarly bibliographies. One letter, certain to be included if not previously destroyed, is a paternal rebuke to John Coolidge, Amherst Freshman. Whether the letter is long or short, stern or gentle, specific or general probably no one but father and son now knows. But this was its old, old theme:

FROM CALVIN TO JOHN COOLIDGE It is with deep regret that I have learned of your failure to pass your term examination in French.

I appreciate your difficulties. When you went up to Amherst* last fall, the people of the college and of the neighboring town of Northampton and of Smith College for women were eager to see you. They asked you to parties. You politely accepted. A brilliant student might have attended all the parties in the neighborhood and still passed all his examinations. But you are not a brilliant student.

You are a good student and can easily pass all your examinations if you do not permit yourself to be too much distracted. If you would please me, you will attend no parties until you have worked off your scholastic deficiency.

Except for his mishap in French-- farcically supposed to have been due to a Democratic professor--John Coolidge has commended himself to the famed little New England College. He will never play on an important varsity team. But he sings first bass in the glee club and may eventually become its leader, although this post usually goes to a tenor. He has been initiated into his father's fraternity (Phi Gamma Delta). He has met with decorum all the customary American assaults upon the dignity of a freshman (they once made him speak half an hour from a soapbox in praise of Senator LaFollette). And President George D. Olds--veteran professor who succeeded Alexander Meiklejohn -- described his academic record as being "very satisfactory."

Slang

In London, it was announced that the new Oxford English Dictionary, now being compiled, would include and define English slang expressions coined during the War, such as: "dud," "doughboy," "strafe." The expression "Getting the wind up," meaning "to become nervous," was said to be puzzling the lexicographers, who finally decided to leave its origin indefinite. Common belief is that this phrase originated with the British air forces. Aviators, to whom wind meant danger, used "getting the wind up" as an equivalent for "borrowing trouble."

Dates

There is evidence that, at coeducational institutions of the U. S., polite social intercourse suffers no whit from stiff formality or inefficient organization. A fortnight ago, women students at the University of California challenged men students to debate the question of whether or not ladies, when invited out to meals or other entertainments by gentlemen, had the right to bear a share in the expenses incurred.

Lately, The Daily Maroon (undergraduate newspaper of the University of Chicago) published the following as front-page intelligence: "PASS THE DATES" SAY MICHIGANITES

One hundred and fifty dates per year with ISO girls is the aim of a men's club recently formed at. the University of Michigan. A man is eligible for membership only after he has been seen in company with a good-looking woman. When initiated into the order, he must disclose her name, address and telephone number to his new brothers. As soon as the name and address are given, any member of the club is privileged to call up and date the woman named.

At Vanderbilt

PROFESSOR -- Stanley Johnson -- Harcourt, Brace ($2.00). At Vanderbilt University, they well recall young Instructor Johnson. He has turned novelist since he left the English Faculty, but still lives in Nashville, Tenn. Reading his gentle arraignment of professorial hypocrisy, they will scowl, or be enthusiastic, self-consciously. The decline and fall of the soul of Dr. J. Tanksley Parkhurst, who took his Chaucer and his reputation seriously enough to become Dean, is staged at Thurston College, New England; but the winters are mild, the "you-alls" plentiful. Vanderbilt will take it personally. At other colleges, if the book is read, more detached criticism will find it a story starved by satire, a satire clogged with narrative.

*John Coolidge was graduated from Mercersburg Academy (Mercersburg, Pa.), June, 1924.