Some would-be cynical, smart undergraduate was showing Vachel King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, and said to him: “The last American we showed round when we asked him what he thought of it, said, ‘Some God-box.’” And he seemed to think that very amusing, and could not understand Lindsay’s silence on the point.
“He did not know for how many years I had lectured on the Gothic and what it meant to me,” said Vachel.
Naturally, I chaffed my companion not a little on his belonging to the S.P.E., and called him to order whenever the arduousness of our campaign prompted him to break across the pure classic of Shakespeare’s tongue, and I made him take note of many expressions, such as “being wished on,” and “handing a man the canned goods,” which I bade him chase from America into the sea.
“I should only be too glad, Stephen,” said he, “if I could get rid of ‘motivate’ and a man’s ‘implications’ and ‘the last analysis’ and ‘the twilight zone’ and ‘canned metaphor’ and the dollar adjectives, a ‘ten-million-dollar building’ and a ‘million-dollar bride.’”
Oxford has asked Chicago
To lend its purifying aid
To the King’s English.
O Oxford! O Bridges!
