Extra Innings by Doris Grumbach Page A

Sybil’s purchases yesterday for the bookstore was a 1988 paperback of a book, Plain Words , on the subject by Sir Ernest Gowers, first published in 1954. Gowers advised writers to prefer ‘get’ or ‘buy’ or ‘win’ to ‘acquire,’ to use ‘rich’ in place of ‘affluent.’ ‘Near’ he finds preferable to ‘adjacent.’
    About ‘adjust’ and ‘alter’ he says, ‘If you mean “change,” say so.’ He derides ‘analogous’; it is a starchy word for ‘like.’ He instructs us to substitute ‘clear,’ ‘plain,’ ‘obvious’ for ‘apparent,’ and ‘find out’ for ‘ascertain.’
    This list is chosen from the list for the letter A in Gowers’s dictionary of short verbal preferences. Fifty more pages follow, for the rest of the alphabet. But I fear that if we forcibly removed fancy words from the speech and writings of most people (including me), we would leave them almost speechless, and certainly unable to compose a letter, a term paper, or a review. For ‘compose’ here I should have used ‘write.’
    I must take this good advice more often. For ‘linguistically contemporary’ in my journal entry before this one I should have said ‘up-to-date.’
    Last night we had a small dinner party for friends. There was much good, witty talk, in which I tried to participate but found it hard. When I am alone I find I can go days without needing to say a word to anyone. Talking is clearly social mucilage, silence a threat to sociability. Recently, I looked through Aleister Crowley’s Diary of a Drug Fiend in the bookstore and copied out: ‘People think that talking is a sign of thinking. It isn’t, for the most part; on the contrary, it’s a mechanical dodge of the body to relieve oneself of the strain of thinking.’
    Coming back from a brief visit to May Sarton in York: We found her weak, thin, in pain, but gallantly working on a new journal to be published on her eightieth birthday and determined to live and write despite her dismaying infirmities. We stop off Route I at Moody Beach where my family and I spent many summers when the children were young. We pull into the Hazeltines’ driveway. Their house is closed up and shuttered—they have gone to Florida for the winter, we are told. We walk out onto the great, flat expanse of a most beautiful beach and a boundless ocean.
    Sybil observes that it looks huge after the relative limitation, almost confinement, of our Cove. Our water is bounded by the rough meadow in front and green banks on either side. It is usually calm; the coming and going of tides are hardly audible.… But here at Moody there is almost no end to the vast carpet of sand and blanket of water, except at the horizon that joins the sky at a great distance. It is the difference between mortality of the Cove and the immortality of the ocean, between backyard and continent.
    For me, Moody, which lies between Ogunquit and Wells at the southern end of Maine, is the Ur-beach. It was where I renewed my love of the sea, which had been lost or buried in my memory from the time I was six and went with my family for the summer to the ocean at Atlantic City. Then, without warning, in the next summer I was sent to a girls’ camp in the mountains, beside a lake, and learned, I remember keenly, the disappointment of limitation. After a few years at camp, I was able to swim about one mile to the far bank of the lake, a feat common to most of the ‘intermediate’ swimmers, as we were called, but one that, to my mind, fatally diminished the glory of Crystal Lake. If I could swim it, it was too small.
    Reluctantly, I came away from Moody Beach. It was like leaving the immeasurable cosmos for a two-foot yardstick at home. Thinking about May on the journey north, I realized how fortunate she is, in a way, to have