It may appear that, up to this point, any attempt to move beyond correctness has been met with a stern admonition. Let us at last leave grammar behind and consider something more intangible, what the Germans call Sprachgefühl, a term so useful that it has made its way into English and is defined in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition, 2003) as "an intuitive sense of what is linguistically appropriate."It is immediately obvious how useful such a faculty is to a writer. If you possess an instinctive sense of how words function (or can acquire it), in particular of how they fit together to form appropriate—that is to say, clear, correct, and expressive—phrases and sentences, then the work of composition and checking ought to become far less laborious. You will know intuitively what makes particular combinations of words felicitous or infelicitous. You will also be aware of the full value of words, which encompasses both their range of meanings and what we might call their aesthetic potential, the way they sound when spoken and their rhythm.The Wit and the Crossword SolverWhen discussing any kind of skill or special faculty, we always come up against the ineluctable fact that some people are born with it and some are not. Those who are lucky enough to possess the language gene (if there is such a thing) or whose brains are hard wired to process linguistic information have an obvious advantage. They are likely to shine in English classes and to be able to learn foreign languages much more quickly than their fellow students. Others have to work much harder in order to achieve the same standard. Among the various categories of people who seem to possess a highly developed feeling for language, there are two that perhaps illustrate the difference between those in whom the talent is inborn and those who have acquired their skills over time, though both, in order to exercise their talents, must possess an above-average capacity for language. Step forward then on the one hand the witty person and on the other hand the person who, when handed a newspaper or magazine, immediately looks for the page where the crossword puzzle is printed.WitWit relies on the ability to understand in a flash the humorous potential of what somebody says or of the situation and to respond in no time with an amusing commentary on it. You cannot be witty unless you have an exceptional sensitivity to language because, without it, you would be unlikely to realize the possibility of other meanings in what was said to you, and you certainly would not be able to exploit those possibilities in your reply. When someone says to Groucho Marx, "There's a man outside with a big black mustache," he immediately interprets this not as a descriptive statement about the man waiting at the door but as an announcement of the arrival of a door-to-door salesman and replies, "Tell him I've got one." It is possible that this exchange was laboriously worked out during a series of scriptwriting sessions, but it is very difficult to imagine that it was not either improvised on the set of Horse Feathers or came to Groucho, in a flash, while the script was being written.Neither Groucho Marx nor any other great wit actually needs a stooge to deliver a feed. Oscar Wilde died, impoverished and in disgrace, in a seedy lodging house in Paris. His last words were "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do." What makes this witty (and full of pathos) is not simply the pun on the word go—"to be removed, die"—nor the allusion to the stock phrase familiar from household disputes either in real life or at least as represented on stage. In addition, it recalls Wilde's whole image—and self-image—as a man of extreme refinement and sensitivity, the decadent aesthete, the lover of art, the wearer of silk and velvet, the last person to put up with awful wallpaper if he had any choice in the matter. All this is hinted at in that final remark. All this contributes to the sense, too, that wit does not simply play with or on words but also plays with or on our broader knowledge and experience of life, and may be used to make a serious point. "The grave's a fine and private place," observed Marvell in summing up his argument against his mistress's coyness, "But none I think do there embrace" (Andrew Marvell [1621–78], "To his Coy Mistress").Marvell's is a studied kind of wit, but wit in general is spontaneous. Most people would agree that it is a gift, doubly a gift, in fact, for you not only have to be born with the feeling for words and the mental quickness that enable you to make the connections but also have to be in the right frame of mind to be able to perform to the best of your ability. Not even the wittiest person in the world can be absolutely certain that he or she will be "on form" on any particular occasion—or, for that matter, be presented with an opportunity to display his or her talents. In that respect, wit has a good deal in common with inspiration. It is not so much that it comes and it goes; it either comes, or it does not. Inspiration, as all writers have discovered at one time or another, sometimes comes and sometimes resolutely refuses to put in an appearance, but you cannot will it into existence. By the same token, you cannot will yourself to be witty, nor can you really learn to be witty. There are no textbooks on the subject. Everyone should learn to appreciate wit, however, because if you can get the point of a witty remark, you are beginning to develop a feeling for language and its subtleties.CrosswordsThe ability to solve a crossword puzzle is a different kind of skill. "Brevity is the soul of wit," as Shakespeare says in Hamlet (2.2.90), but crossword solving requires you to apply your mind to the problem for some length of time. There are some people, admittedly, who can take a crossword and solve it in five or 10 minutes, but the majority of crossword enthusiasts, though they might envy such ability, would not necessarily covet it, because a good deal of their pleasure comes from a prolonged battle of wits with the compiler.A simple crossword tests your general knowledge—College town near Bangor (5 letters); Author of Breakfast at Tiffany's (6 letters)—and, more particularly, your ability to find a term that fits the description given—Writing material (3 letters)—or that is a synonym for the word given in the clue—Speed (8 letters). If you already know a lot of words, you have an advantage, but in attempting to work out the answer, you may learn more words or at least bring the words that you already know to the forefront of your mind.The words that each individual knows fall into two categories: the words that you know the meaning of and can understand, and the words that you actually know how to use. The words in the former category are your "passive vocabulary"; the words in the latter constitute your "active vocabulary." A writer needs a large active vocabulary, and anything you can do to enhance it, including searching for the solution to a crossword clue and entering it in the grid, is useful.As crossword clues become less straightforward, they begin to test your language resources more. The clue "Speed (8 letters)" is likely to tax you only until you remember various possibilities: rapidity or velocity or perhaps even celerity. But if the clue were "Speed (4 letters)," you might have to think a little harder. If neither pace nor rate fitted, then you would have to recall that the word speed is not only a noun, it is also a verb. Consequently, four-letter words such as race, dash, dart, rush, and bolt could also come into consideration. As the clues become more cryptic, so they start to call into play something like the sensitivity to words that wit requires. If the clue is, for example, "Man of war (7 letters)," you have to ask yourself whether the answer is the word warship—which is what the term means in the first instance—or a word for a particular type of warship—say, cruiser—or whether the crossword compiler is actually setting a trap for the literal minded. Perhaps he or she is making a pun and in an oblique way is referring to a man whose business is war, by analogy with a man of God whose business is a religious ministry. The correct answer might therefore be soldier or warrior.Taking this approach even further, some crossword setters attempt to write clues that make sense (or more or less make sense) as literal statements but are to be understood by the solver as containing both a direct indication of the solution and a set of coded instructions for extracting the solution from the surrounding context. On that basis "Operator takes head of tuna fish, producing caviar (8 letters)" generates the solution sturgeon. Readers who are not familiar with the crooked thinking and subtle wordplay of crossword compilers may be slightly mystified by the procedure that enables the solver to arrive at this solution, but the procedure is quite logical. The clue proper is "fish producing caviar"—the comma is, if the reader will excuse the pun, a red herring. The compiler wishes the solver, on first reading the clue, to imagine a worker in a magical fish-canning factory. But operator is a pun and, in this instance, refers to a person who performs operations, that is, a "surgeon"; the word surgeon "takes," that is, incorporates, the "head of tuna," that is, the first letter of the word tuna, "t": hence, sturgeon.It is no part of the purpose of this book to explain in detail the art of crossword solving or list all the well-established codes employed by crossword compilers. There are already plenty of books on the market and sites on the World Wide Web that do just that. Nor can it be claimed that crossword solvers necessarily are better stylists than the average person. The brief account given above is merely intended to show how a sense of the possibilities of language is involved in the setting and solution of crosswords, just as it is in wit. Crucially, however, it is eminently possible to learn the art of solving crosswords, whereas it is next to impossible to acquire a capacity for wit if you do not happen to be born with it. By beginning with the easy puzzles and gradually working your way up to the more challenging ones; by learning how to use that extremely useful tool for writers, a thesaurus; by remembering that the same word can function as several different parts of speech and can have radically different meanings depending on whether it is being used in ordinary discourse, informally, or as slang; and, finally, by skewing your approach to the words you see printed as a clue so that you start expecting to encounter puns, code words, and other kinds of verbal trickery, you too can acquire a certain amount of expertise as a crossword solver.And if you can do that, then, by setting about the task in the right way, you can acquire a feeling for language as well.Acquiring a Feeling for LanguageTypes of AwarenessLet us first consider once again what it is that we are trying to acquire. Words, especially the words of a highly developed and slowly matured language such as English, carry a lot of baggage. If each word in the dictionary had one sense and was only ever used as one part of speech, life would be a lot simpler for speakers and writers, but also a lot less interesting. The numeral 1 can only ever refer to a single quantity; the word one, by contrast, has three separate entries in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, and each of those entries defines several different senses. So, the first item on our list of desirable acquisitions is an awareness that any individual word can have multiple meanings and be used in a variety of different ways.The second item is an awareness that the other meanings of a word do not simply vanish when we choose to use that word in a particular sense. If they did, then it would be impossible to make puns. Those other senses are always latent in the word. We can never absolutely rely on another person understanding a word in precisely the sense that we intended. Our readers and hearers may approach what we say rather in the way that an experienced crossword solver approaches a cryptic clue, unless we do our best to prevent them.What usually pins down a word to a particular sense—or, to put it another way, releases a particular sense from a given word—is the context in which it appears. Take a simple statement such as "It is not done." Those four words on their own do not supply sufficient information for us to be able to understand what done means in this instance. Something is needed to supply a context. If we replace It with The meat, we know immediately what the statement means, likewise if we extend the statement so that it reads "It is not done to behave like that in public." So the third item on the list is an awareness that words are context sensitive, and that fitting words to their context and the context to words is all important if we are to communicate our intended meaning effectively.The fourth is an awareness of this other dimension that words possess, their implicit emotional charge. In addition to their regular meanings, many words have what are called "connotations." When we say that a particular word has connotations of this or that, we mean that it is generally associated with this or that emotion, mood, or phenomenon and that its meaning is colored by that association. The word angelic, for example, has entirely positive connotations: It has an aura of benignity, sweetness, and beauty, the qualities we traditionally associate with angels. The word expedient, on the other hand, has generally rather negative connotations; it suggests, without quite making it explicit, that a person is acting out of self-interest. We may recall, perhaps, the saying attributed to the high priest Caiaphas in the Gospel of John in the Bible that it was "expedient that one man should die for the people" (John 18:14). If we take a pair of common words that are opposite in meaning, such as broad and narrow, for example, we often find that they have different connotations as well. Generally speaking—and this time leaving aside the Gospel where the wide gate and the broad way lead to destruction, while the strait gate and the narrow way lead to eternal life—the connotations of broad are more positive than those of narrow. Broadness suggests comfort, expansiveness, freedom; narrowness suggests discomfort, tightness, and restriction. You are unlikely to use narrow if you intend to pay a compliment to someone or something. When Emily Dickinson (1830–86) begins her poem about a snake with the lines "A narrow fellow in the grass / Occasionally rides," she chooses the adjective narrow perhaps not simply because it aptly describes the body of a snake but also because it suggests the automatic distrust you would feel toward a "narrow fellow" belonging to the human family—a person who looked cunning or sharp or secretive and might be quick to do you harm if you gave him or her the opportunity.The fifth item takes us away from the area of meaning altogether. Although the primary function of words is to be carriers of meaning, that is not their only function. They are also carriers of sound. It is easy to forget this if you are working with words principally on paper or on screen. But the sound that words make when spoken is not irrelevant to the act of writing. It has already been suggested that you should listen to "your mind's voice"; that recommendation is worth repeating here. In putting words down on paper, you should not be consigning them to silence evermore. On the contrary, you should think of the words you put down on paper as being akin to the musical notes that the composer marks on the stave.The sixth and final item follows from the fifth. You should know how the words you use are pronounced. Unless you know how to pronounce words correctly, you cannot truly appreciate their sound value, and unless you know on which of their syllables the accent falls in ordinary speech, you cannot appreciate their rhythm. Both sound and rhythm are relevant to style. Above and beyond that, however, a love of words develops mainly from their life off the page. Nobody loves the word serendipity because it has five syllables or because the upstrokes of d and t balance the downstrokes of p and y. It is loved firstly because it denotes a nice idea and secondly because it is a nice word to say. Not all words have sound qualities that reflect their sense, but some do. The long moaning vowel sounds in lugubrious, for example, seem to reinforce the melancholy associations of that word, whereas the short, bright vowels of scintillating convey something of the brilliance that the word denotes. There are two possible pronunciations of the word flaccid: "flassid" and "flacksid." The former, with a longer vowel sound and the long breathy sound of ss in the middle, seems to represent the meaning of the word—limp and droopily relaxed—far better than the latter, which has a shorter vowel and a crack or snap in the middle. We should savor these qualities in the words that possess them and do our best to utilize those same qualities in our prose when the opportunity presents itself.Becoming AwareTo know what sensitivities you wish to acquire is probably more than half the battle in this particular case. Once you know what you are seeking—in this case, the kinds of awareness detailed in the previous subsection—you will soon realize that you do not really need to go far in order to find it. The basic handbooks of the writer's craft are reference works on language, particularly dictionaries. Dictionaries not only give all the senses of words and all their parts of speech, they also show how words are pronounced, how they are divided up into syllables, and on which syllable or syllables the stress falls. They also give brief accounts of the history and development of the modern forms of English words, which can sometimes illuminate aspects of the meaning of those words that are not immediately apparent.But any book, particularly any book by a good writer, can be a potential source of information and inspiration. With respect to the particular qualities of language that we have been discussing, books of poetry are an especially useful resource. Poets do not, it should be emphasized, have a monopoly on rhythmic language or mellifluous sound. At the same time, however, rhythm and sound quality are central to the writing of poetry, whereas they are of lesser importance to most writers of prose. If we wish to be sensitized to them, then it is a good idea to consult the experts. Ezra Pound, in a letter, suggested that "poetry must be as well written as prose." Prose writers can learn as much from poetry, however, and if we can appreciate why lines such as the following work as poetry, we shall gain a greater understanding of the rhythmic and acoustic possibilities of language:"I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god …" (T. S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages," in Four Quartets [1941]). "Complacencies of the peignoir and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug …" (Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning," in Harmonium [1923]). "For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love …" (John Donne [1572–1631], "The Canonization.") These are the opening lines of poems by T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and John Donne, respectively. None of them departs far, if at all, from the word order or the rhythms of ordinary prose, but if you prefer your poetry to have a more pronounced and regular rhythm and a set rhyme scheme, you will still be able to learn the same basic lesson from it. Language is a form of energy compressed into sounds and syllables, and that energy is there for you to exploit.So, consult dictionaries, read prose and poetry, and listen to the language that is being used around you. There is a kind of caricature of the writer that suggests that, while everyone else is merrily engaged in conversation, he or she is sitting on the sidelines, not joining in but carefully noting down what is said in a notebook. George Bernard Shaw wrote an amusing little play, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, in which he depicts William Shakespeare picking up his best lines from, among others, a beefeater on guard outside the Tower of London. It is a caricature, but there is an element of truth in it. All writers do, and in fact should, eavesdrop on the people with whom they come into contact. (On a practical level, however, it is usually advisable to carry any pearls home in your memory, rather than to pull out your notebook on the spot!) If you happen to be writing something that contains direct speech or is in dialogue, you may be able to use your gleanings in their original form. More important, however, you will learn new words, new ways of using the words and phrases that you already know, and something of the rhythms of ordinary speech. All of these you can use to benefit your own writing.
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