I recall my father’s reply when my mother asked why he was so long in joining her in the car during a school Parents’ Night in England decades ago. I had told her that I had seen him talking to the mother of a classmate of mine, Bobby Tether. Dad confirmed this when he re-appeared: “Sorry, I couldn’t get away. I was tethered.”
Examples of le mot juste abound in literature of merit, as you might expect. Playwrights, novelists, and especially poets, earn their reputations as wordsmiths, after all. In his famous two-line poem In A Station of the Metro, Ezra Pound writes, “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.” The poet is looking down at a crowd waiting for a train in a Paris subway station. What he sees is transformed by an “apparition” born of poetic insight: faces in the crowd below, seem to be “petals” on a “black bough,” presumably because these constitute the multitude waiting patiently for the train, all wearing dark raincoats on account of the day’s rain. Such is the power of metaphor. Ezra Pound was a friend of the great Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot, who in his celebrated poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock chronicles his narrator Prufrock’s awareness of the meaninglessness of his lonely life of cocktail and coffee parties beset with trivial conversations with people briefly met and then quickly forgotten. He says “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” His life has been, he tells us, characterized by decorative cutlery: that, he believes, has been the value of his entire life…
Yet another American poet, Randall Jarrell, wrote of the fate of a member of the flight crew of a World War II bomber aircraft in his poem The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. This young man’s task was to protect the aircraft from an enemy fighter approaching from behind. In a mere five lines, Jarrell powerfully conveys the nature, extent, and significance of the sacrifice this crew member has made in his violent and premature death, summing up in a single word an unforgettable image– a mot juste– of what has remained of him after the attack:
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze,
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
In Animal Farm, his political fable about totalitarian governments, George Orwell describes the perversion of the ideal of “equality” that is the mantra of revolutionary utopians everywhere. After ousting the human proprietors of Manor Farm, the pigs re-name it “Animal Farm”, promising all animals an end to subservience for them. All animals are now to be equal. But all too soon, the promise is amended to read, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” The pigs will be privileged, as Party members were in the unlamented former Soviet Union. The other poor animals are dimly aware that the revised slogan is somehow a betrayal of their Revolution, but lack the intelligence to see that one form of servitude has merely replaced an earlier form. You cannot have degrees of equality: you are either “equal” or “unequal”; that is what the words mean. A political system based on duplicity and misuse of language may pretend that conditions for its people have “improved”, but this is mere deception, as are today’s common use of euphemisms such as “passed” for “died”, or “re-educated” used by tyrants to mean “brainwashed.” Orwell’s essay Politics and the English Language makes clear his commitment to truth and honesty in the correct use of words.
