Excerpt of the Day: "The Elements of Expression" by Arthur Plotnik

Looking for a book on proper grammar?  The Elements of Expression isn’t it.  In a world of wikis, updated statuses, and texts, Arthur Plotnik takes language-users on a journey through expressiveness.  Humorous and witty, this book allows you—speakers, writers, and self-improvers—to take a fresh look at how you express yourself.

If that doesn’t interest you, maybe an excerpt will:

Something moves you to express your thoughts. The subject is love. Or beauty. Mortality. Some poignant experience.

You hesitate—and well you should. Launching ideas as messages is not exactly blowing kisses from a train. You are putting thoughts into words, which is more like flapping the tongue to escape gravity. We work our tongues endlessly, but liftoff is so rare it’s a miracle we don’t keel over like some NASA dud.

Yet we go on flapping rather than fall silent or simply moo at one another. We struggle with words because they separate us from the lowing beasts and tell the world who we are, what we want, and why. 

No one will dispute the need for verbal expression, because no one will sit still to listen. The need is assumed, but it is never more clearly illustrated than when Americans visit foreign lands of funny-speaking people. Even with a stock of their funny phrases we find it difficult to express our individuality. We barely distinguish ourselves from the wash jerking on the clotheslines. We feel like babies, unable to express the nuances of pleasure and discontent. And babies hate that feeling.

In foreign travel I often find myself, oh, about fifty thousand words short of being interesting to anyone but the local pickpockets. I remember one moody trip when, traveling alone, I dined night after night talking to my cheeses and such mistakenly ordered dishes as pickled cow’s face with hairy nostrils. One evening, a sensitive-looking young couple gestured for me to join them. We exchanged basic phrases, but what I wanted to express was an overflow of feeling, something like this:

My dear companionable saviors—For the last three weeks a shadow of melancholy has obscured my perceptions, dimming the beauty of your countryside and the conviviality of its inhabitants. Solitude, when no longer self-imposed, soon deepens into isolation and near madness.  Now, however, as your kind concern and sensitivity restore my spirit, all that I have perceived unscrolls and engulfs me in its majesty. I exalt in your land and its people.

What came out was the equivalent of “Me like here. Food good. Everything very good. You go America?”

They’d sat a three-year-old at their table.