A raid on the inarticulate

A post of mine to the Copyediting List in October 1998:

Last February, in the middle of a standard battle between reporters and copy editors on the SPJ list, I threw out a remark to the effect of: "Come off it. Whether copy editors or reporters, most of us -- I include myself -- are at best mediocre, anyway." I think the word "slovenly" came into it. One veteran copy editor responded: Speak for yourself, Parker. And I answered thus:

I was just trying to be honest. If I live another 44 years and use them to good purpose, reading and writing far more, and more carefully, than I have thus far, I'll still consider myself no more than a trifler with my own tongue. Consider the following passage, from near the end of "East Coker" in T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets":

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres -
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Smugness and arrogance make bad writers and copy editors; the humble ones keep asking questions, learning and improving.

If we think we're the only salvation of the English language, it's in deep trouble.