There is much to be said for technical ineptitude. Once again last night, I came very near to commenting on a video on a social media venue. One of my favorites was replying to a comment by getting into costume and…never mind. You had to be there. I have enough to do just explaining that my comment relied in the first place on an outmoded expression, and was reinforced by a reference to a book not one person in a million has read. I haven’t read it myself. (Though that is no reason not to cite it, as anyone familiar with the Interwebs will understand.)
I was going to mention, in passing, a one hundred year old reference book of which, for my sins, I owned two copies as a child. (I may still own a copy: over several moves, books went into boxes with wild abandon.) In its own way, it IS a legend of American literature, a treasure known as Putnam’s Phrase Book.
This mighty reference was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons (hence the name) in 1921, and was assembled by one Edwin Hamlin Carr, who is apparently known for nothing beyond this one wonderful work. He tells us it was the work of a lifetime, plucking useful phrases from everything he read, hoping these would inspire users to pepper their own writing with such phrases. He includes a number of examples of letters which can be composed using his….what shall we call it?
How about “Cliché Thesaurus”?
Consider, for example, phrases he suggests you use to describe something mysterious. He starts with “Into those invisible regions where we cannot follow”, which is intriguing, not to say mysterious, itself, and then proceeds to “Clothed in a cloak of mystery”, “Shrouded in mystery”, “A great deal of hokus-pokus”, “It was Greek to me” (which he properly ascribes to Shakespear), and “Utterly inexplicable”.
For those people who find themselves confronted by the mysterious, we have these phrases for someone who is “Perplexed”: “Utterly at sea, “I am really at the end of my tether”, “It is very vague”, “We cannot make much of it”, and “Utterly inscrutable”. It is no crime to use the word “utterly” so often, even if one is writing a book about substituting exciting phrases for what you were going to write.
He admits in his very short (and largely metaphor-free) introduction that he has slanted his material. Mr. Carr was a writer of the 1920s, when optimism was considered a civic duty, and he tells us he has emphasized “commendation, optimism, and courtesy”. Obviously, he has no relevance in the era of social media.
So under “Pessimistic”, though he HAS included pessimistic phrases—“Doleful recollections”, “A damper of my hopes”, “Smothered under the wet blanket of”, and “Fallen into the Slough of Despond”—we also get descriptions of pessimistic people: “He always has a plentiful stock of gloomy ideas”, “A peddler of pessimism”, and “He indulges in the gloomiest forebodings”. (He even includes a phrase for that last person to use: “No rosy delusions should be permitted to warp our judgement.”)
WERE there people who felt the need to consult Mr. Carr to come up with such utterly pedestrian phrases for their work? Well, it is a thick (though pocket-sized) book and it sold a LOT of copies, so there may well have been professions (politics jumps to mind—thought of that one myself, but I bet it’s in the book) who felt having a copy of this on the desk might be just the cure for a moment of writer’s block. His reference book CAN, he hints, be used to prompt your own phrase creation. You could read through a section and think, “I can do better than that!” and proceed to prove it.
So besides making myself look at least four or five years older than I actually am, I am glad I did not mock Putnam’s Phrase Book on social media. Perhaps, in saying, “Since we all talk in phrases as well as in words, every home needs a phrase book as well as a dictionary”, Mr. Carr was right after all. We need not, as he might say himself, regard his life’s work as “Arid and unfruitful”, “Cheap and tawdry”, “Of no particular moment”, or “Utterly repudiated”.
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