Dear Geist,

Can you tell me who said “The predominant fault of the bad English encountered today is not the crude vulgarism of the untaught but the blithe irresponsibility of the taught”? Google is silent on it. Oh—and also when it was said, if you can find out. I found it scribbled on a bit of paper and tucked into an ancient edition of the Norton Anthology.

—Gary Franconio, en route to Toronto

Dear Gary,

The sentence was written by Jacques Barzun (1907–2012), a writer, historian and educator, author of scores of works, including several on the subject of writing clean, clear English prose. The passage appears in his book On Writing, Editing, and Publishing (1971, and subsequent editions), in an essay about widespread hand-wringing over the “deterioration of English.” It's not inaccurate spelling or perfectly clear slang terms that are causing the trouble, he writes, but “science and technology” and “every separate school or 'ism'” pouring “quantities of awkward new words into the language,” obscuring and fuzzing up plain English. For example, he asks: Which of these sentences brings forth a clear image?

(a) I'll contact you to finalize the agreement.

(b) I'll call at your office to sign the contract.

We agree.

In our opinion, Barzun could have grooved with the times a bit more without weakening his various arguments—certain assumptions about language and women, for example—but we wouldn't be without his book Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers, or this one you stumbled on. He was the real thing.

—The Editors