WRITER'S GUIDE AND INDEX TO ENGLISH
By Porter Gale Perrin '17. Scott, Foresman & Cos., 1942, xii + 800. $2.00.
When the author of a mere rhetoric and writer's handbook gets a favorable page review of his work and his photograph in Time, he must have turned out something not only firstrate but new.. So Porter Perrin did with his Index to English in 1939 (see Time for 7 August of that year) and he now confirms and promises to extend his original success in a second and enlarged edition shrewdly re-entitled Writer's Guide and Index to English.Shades of Baldwin and Woolley! Perrin's book proves that there is such a thing as progress. Where the older rhetoricians were pontifical and dry-as-dust, he addresses his readers—the college student and his graduate brothers who in business and professions have occasions to write—in the higher colloquial mood of the best talk, unpretentious but lively, now and then quietly humorous, always assured with the assurance of sound scholarship and the humane wisdom of a liberal teacher. His doctrine is that "Good English is based on appropriateness in the language to the subject and situation, to the reader or listener, and to the writer or speaker"; and considerations of appropriateness, honestly weighed, will determine a writer to express himself possibly in the vulgate ("the soil out of which much reputable English has grown"), most probably in Informal English ("the typical language of an educated person going about his everyday business"), or Formal English (which "bears the relation to informal English that formal dress or a uniform does to the clothes worn at everyday work in office or store"). Usage on the various levels is exemplified throughout the book by apt and ample quotations from Thurber, Steinbeck, the New Yorker, Fortune, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Quincy Howe, Clarence Day, Lin Yutang, and a score of other contemporaries, besides such classics as Santayana, Arnold, Dryden. More than half the book consists of brief articles on moot points of usage, alphabetically arranged. These are pithy, succinct, and sane, and very handy for reference.
