Crennis on the Codersperl

Hearst Columnist Westbrook Pegler, who has malice toward many and charity for few, has been a particularly vehement critic of 1) the New Deal, 2) legal mumbo jumbo, and 3) Justice Felix Frankfurter. Last week, Peg whirled himself around his head and launched himself at all three targets. It was a difficult project, he explained. "It is only by sifting . . . and . . . carefully examining the more fetulant alticae of [Frankfurter's] lucubrations that one can clearly prove the codersperl."

"But," wrote Pegler, "there is no better paper for this purpose than Frankfurter's notorious opinion for the majority in the historic Ablative Case wherein he had the effrontery to say: 'The term labor dispute' amid a rationale of morpulent ambriscence commonly adumbrates an attempt to immunize the immediate postulate.

"For, after all, is it not by now conceded that, a fortiori, if marzeydoats and doazey-doats then the invariable corallary is habeas corpus mandamus potatus? We find ourselves at last in a grave pertilurgical wolderfat. What wonder if the gront-laub and the solemn American omitrads quebot on the homatrove by the dawn's early light?"

Government gobbledegook got another salute this week--two Harvard-educated War Department employees, James R. Masterson and Wendell Phillips, published a tongue-in-cheek explanation of "How to write in and/or for Washington." Their book, Federal Prose, explained that the incomprehensible language of Government reports was difficult to learn, but not impossible.

Like all good textbooks, it furnished examples:

"Haste makes waste," written in Federal Prose, became: "Precipitation entails negation of economy." "Jack fell down and broke his crown" became: "A youth, designated only as 'Jack,' sustained, incident to a loss of equilibrium, a fracture of the cranium."

"The old gray mare came out of the wilderness, forty-five years ago," became, through brilliant translation: "At a period subsequent to 1905 but prior to 1915 the subject mare, described as anile and in consequence grizzled, issued for motives unknown from a region defined only as uninhabited."

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