Don't Say It!

John Baker Opdycke, husband of the Theatre Guild's famed Director Theresa Helburn (with whom he lives in a house called Terrytop in the Connecticut hills), is no mediocrity himself. Educated at Franklin and Marshall College, New York University, Cornell, Columbia and Oxford, he was a newshawk at three Olympic Games (1904, '08, '12), wrote 22 books on prose style, advertising technique, etc. He was also for 35 years a teacher of English, most of the time in New York City high schools, from which he retired at 60 last year. Teaching, journalism and writing developed in Professor Opdycke a horror of seeing mayhem committed on the English language.

This week, in a book of 850 pages, Professor Opdycke pointed out and tried to correct the English-speaking world's most common errors. His book, less authoritative but more entertaining than famed H. W. Fowler's Modern English Usage, is titled Don't Say It!/- Highlights:

>Among the most frequent mistakes in grammar (habitually made by the press, and even by college graduates): I only have two; You will do as I say; What are his politics? She goes from worst to worst; He's better than any man in the world.

> The ampersand (&) should not be used in formal composition, "is correctly used in commercial statements and the like."

> Automobile, one of the 20 most frequently mispronounced words, may be accented on any syllable but the second, but Professor Opdycke advises saying auto instead.

> First syllable of bowdlerize rhymes with loud.

> Hardly should be close to the word it modifies. Wrong: They hardly gave a thought. . . . Correct: They gave hardly a thought. . . .

> In re is "a show-off term."

>"Statistics must not be pronounced rapidly ... a long bungled hiss may result."

>"Adorable is a woman's word. It is not much used by MEN."

> "Darned is the word the ladies use--or once used--for damned. Don't say darned in pseudo-blasphemy or in poetry, or in regard to mending the socks."

>"The vulgar arrest attention with say; the more vulgar with listen; the most vulgar with lookit."

/- Funk & Wagnalls ($5).

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