How to Stay in Style

When I was growing up, I often heard my mother quote the lines:

“Be not the first by whom the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”

Then in college I came across the whole stanza:

“In words as fashions the same rule will hold,
Alike fantastic if too new or old;
Be not the first by whom the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.”
–Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism”

It’s good advice in 2010 (particularly for the Congress and the President), as it was in the 17th and 18th centuries when the English poet lived. My mother used it with regard to fashion in clothes. I don’t know if she ever applied it to words (in writing, Pope meant), but I disagree with him in that category. Occasionally I have used an obsolete word intervale as if I were resurrecting it for all. I learned its meaning by seeing a tiny drawing of an intervale in a dictionary, and realized using it would save several words in describing the scene any other way. But it’s difficult to find it in a dictionary. Perhaps it’s in an unabridged Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary (20 volumes). I suppose that beautiful word went out of style because too many Americans couldn’t differentiate between it and interval. That’s the sort of thing that happens to a living language. As for being the first by whom the new is tried, I think I may be the inventor of the word “onblog,” a companion to “online.”

♥