Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Plea for Greater Simplicity in the Language of Science
Science ignores geographical lines and bemoans the babel of tongues which hin ders the free interchange of ideas between all the peoples of the earth. Nevertheless, the international character of technical literature is suggested by the fact that three languages, French, German and English, are practically recognized as the standard mediums of intellectual exchange. One of these affords the most lucid solvent of thought, another is the speech.of the most philosophical of European people and the third goes with world-wide dominion, so that each has a claim to become the recognized language of science. The brotherhood of thinking men will have been fully recognized when all agree to employ the same tongue in their inter course, but such a far-oil? Divine event' is not within the probabilities of the pres ent, consequently there remains only for us to make the best of our own particular language and to safeguard its purity, sothat when it goes abroad the people of other countries may at least be assured that they are not dealing with the debased currency of speech.
Barrie has remarked that in this age the man of science appears to be the only one who has anything to say and the only one who does not know how to say it. It is far otherwise in politics, an occupation which numbers among its followers a great many persons who have the ability for speaking. Far beyond anything worth the saying that they have to say. Nor is it so in the arts, the high priests of which, ao cording to Huxley, have the power of ex pression so cultivated that their sensual caterwauling may be almost mistaken for the music of the spheres.' In science there is a language as of coded telegrams, by the use of which a limited amount of informa tion is conveyed through the medium of six-syllabled words. Even when not thus overburdened with technical terms it is too often the case that scientific concep tions are conveyed in a raw and unpala table form, mere indigestible chunks of knowledge, as it were, which are apt to provoke mental dyspepsia. Why, I ask, should the standard English prose of the day be a chastened art and the writing of science, in a great scientific era, merely an unkempt dressing of splendid ideas? The luminous expositions of Huxley, the occa sioual irradiating imagery of Tyndall, the manly speech of Le Conte, and of a very few others, all serve simply to emphasize the fact that the literature of scientific re search as a whole is characterized by a ?at and ungainly style, which renders it dis tasteful to all but those who have a great hunger for learning.
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