Towards the end of May 1940, newspaper posters were prohibited in order to save paper. Several newspapers, however, continued to display posters for some time afterwards. On inquiry it was found that they were using old ones. Such headlines as ‘Panzer Divisions Hurled Back’ or ‘French Army Standing Firm’ could be used over and over again. Then came the period when the paper-sellers supplied their own posters with a slate and a bit of chalk, and in their hands the poster became a comparatively sober and truthful thing. It referred to something that was actually in the paper you were going to buy, and it usually picked out the real news and not some piece of sensational nonsense. The paper-sellers, who frequently did not know which way round a capital S goes, had a better idea of what is news, and more sense of responsibility towards the public, than their millionaire employers.
    Our correspondent considers that the public and the journalists rather than the proprietors are to blame for the silliness of English newspapers. You could not, he implies, make an intelligent newspaper pay because the public wants tripe. I am not certain whether this is so. For the time being most of the tripe has vanished and newspaper circulations have not declined. But I do agree – and I said so – that the journalists share the blame. In allowing their profession to be degraded they have largely acted with their eyes open, whereas, I suppose, to blame somebody like Northcliffe for making money in the quickest way is like blaming a skunk for stinking.

One mystery about the English language is why, with the biggest vocabulary in existence, it has to be constantly borrowing foreign words and phrases. Where is the sense, for instance, of saying cul de sac when you mean blind alley? Other totally unnecessary French phrases are joie de vivre, amour propre, reculer pour mieux sauter, raison d’etre, vis-a-vis, tete-a-tete, au pied de la lettre, esprit de corps. There are dozens more of them. Other needless borrowings come from Latin (though there is a case for ‘i.e.’ and ‘e.g.’, which are useful abbreviations), and since the war we have been much infested by German words, Gleichschaltung, Lebensraum, Weltanschauung, Wehrmacht, Panzerdivisionen and others being flung about with great freedom. In nearly every case an English equivalent already exists or could easily be improvised. There is also a tendency to take over American slang phrases without understanding their meaning. For example, the expression ‘barking up the wrong tree’ is fairly widely used, but inquiry shows that most people don’t know its origin nor exactly what it means.
    Sometimes it is necessary to take over a foreign word, but in that case we should anglicize its pronunciation, as our ancestors used to do. If we really need the word ‘café’ (we got on well enough with ‘coffee house’ for two hundred years), it should either be spelled ‘caffay’ or pronounced ‘cayfe’. ‘Garage’ should be pronounced ‘garridge’. For what point is there in littering our speech with fragments of foreign pronunciation, very tiresome to anyone who does not happen to have learned that particular language?
    And why is it that most of us never use a word of English origin if we can find a manufactured Greek one? One sees a good example of this in the rapid disappearance of English flower names. What until twenty years ago was universally called a snapdragon is now called an antirrhinum, a word no one can spell without consulting a dictionary. Forget-me-nots are coming more and more to be called myosotis. Many other names, Red Hot Poker, Mind Your Own Business, Love Lies Sleeping, London Pride, are disappearing in favour of colourless Greek names out of botany textbooks. I had better not continue too long on this subject, because last time I mentioned flowers in this column an indignant lady wrote in to say that flowers are bourgeois. But I don’t think it a good augury for the future of the English language that ‘marigold’ should be dropped in favour of ‘calendula’, while the pleasant little Cheddar Pink loses is name and becomes merely Dianthus Caesius.