Pretentious Illiteracy

Until he became First Baron Conesford of Chelsea, Henry George Strauss, 64, was a longtime (20 years) Tory M.P. whose dry, legalistic speeches often had the unhappy effect of emptying the House of Commons of all but its most conscientious members. But last week his lordship was the center of a controversy that gave him the biggest audience of his career. In effect he had raised a delicate question: Who is responsible for corrupting the English language?

In a speech before the Authors' Club of London, his lordship charged that America must take the blame for much that is bad in current English. American slang is often "virile and admirable," and his lordship gave his blessings to such terms as bulldozer, blurb, debunk. But he was appalled by the U.S. use of face up to for face, meet up with for meet, check up on for check. "These atrocities are probably due to the influence of German immigrants who did not learn English."

Mildly Improper? Then there was that horrid word, underprivileged. "The Americans use it because of their fashion for using long words they don't understand and rejecting short words like poor, which they consider mildly improper." It was. in short, just one more example of American "pretentious illiteracy." Added Lord Conesford: "How would it have been if Sir Winston Churchill, instead of saying, 'Give us the tools and we will finish the job,' had said, 'Donate us the implements and we shall finalize the assignment'?"

The U.S. press quickly picked up the story, but not without an argument. U.P. Staff Correspondent H. D. Quigg wondered whether his lordship would prefer to have the Gettysburg Address begin: "Eighty-seven years ago our fathers founded here a new nation." And what about the about, asked Quigg, in the Biblical phrase, "And the glory of the Lord shone round about them"? But Lord Conesford stuck to his guns. Last week, invited to appear on CBS-TV's The Last Word, he landed in the U.S. to continue the attack.

Inspirational? One Americanism that irritates him, he told reporters, is the word hospitalized. "If a man is hospitalized, what is he when he is cured? De-hospitalized? Homeized?" He deplored the tendency to substitute alibi for excuse, called the phrase bi-partisan foreign policy absurd because it could only mean "doubly partisan." And what, he added, do Americans mean by inspirational--inspired or inspiring?

On TV, his lordship found himself on the defensive. Is it not true, asked M.C. Bergen Evans, that "you in England refer to what we call slums as depressed areas? Do you refer to unemployed people as a redundancy of workers? Do you refer to a moving van as a pantechnicon?" All too true, said his lordship, and added sadly that Britain's ratcatchers--"a most admirable set of men"--have decided it would be more dignified to be called rodent operators.

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