Close the Eye-Lid and Save the Eye
Repeated experience has shown that the eye closes so quickly that where the lens is broken and pieces of glass fly from it, the eye-lid is almost invariably shut; if any cut is received it is on the outside of the lid, and superficial in character. The goggles "give" somewhat under the impact of a blow, and the fraction of a second's time thus saved is sufficient to close the eye-lid and save the eye. Where the force of a flying chip is so great as to break a heavy lens of this kind, it is obvious that the eye-ball would be shattered, even though the eye-lid were closed, if no goggle were used.
At a recent safety exposition one of the goggle manufacturers gave a graphic demonstration of the resistive power of good lenses. Repeated blows from a plunger actuated by a strong spring often failed to even crack the glass. Many workmen have been reassured in this way, where they were at first afraid to wear goggles lest they should get particles of broken glass in their eyes.
-- David Stewart Beyer, Industrial Accident Prevention (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 373-4.
Tony Judt
In “Politics and the English Language,†Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…â€). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,†we risk the rise of “nospeak.â€
I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.
Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.
-- Tony Judt, "Words," The New York Review of Books, July 15, 2010.
