Ghostwritten
I love when pieces of paper fall out of old books. It feels like you've just won a FREE PRIZE. Here's one of the more interesting pieces I've had fall out. Four small typewritten sheets from an Oxford Don (or pseuDONymous undergraduate?) about the use of idiom in the contemporary novel of the time (late nineteen-forties?). So I guess this is my first guest written (or ghost written) post. If anyone is able to tell me anything about 'Vernon Fork' I would appreciate it. Curiosity may have killed the cat but it wasn't satisfied with that.
A Sense of Idiom
I have been reading some novels by contemporary writers which describe the mind and speech of the younger men, those who have been in the services before and after the war. These writers seem to belong to a school which could be described as hard, or perhaps I might even use the word, tough. The young men of today, as described by them, are not rebels or idealists; they have a cynicism and indifference to ideal values and, surprising in young people, an entire absence of naiveté. But what impresses me most is their language, the use of coarse words to describe all incidents and ideas, coupled with the use of sacred words in a profane sense, what we used to call (I suppose it was rather prudish) swearing. And this mode of speech, I understand from the novelist, is not confined to those who have lacked advantages of breeding and education but is universal; staff officers and sergeant-majors and barges, if that is still the term for employees of the transport board engaged in inland navigation, all talk alike. So the novelists say and, as the reviewers are unanimous in testifying to their realism and their sincerity, one must believe them, for, if a man writes sincerely about what he knows to be real, what he writes must be true.
