Louis Roney: Using the old bean

Finding new and more economical ways of saying things is admirable it seems to me.

Through the years, I have listened to a colleague — of far more formal education than I can claim — begin many sentences with, “At this point in time.”

One day, in a flash of rare insight, even clairvoyance, I conceived a briefer way to convey the expression in a way that saves all of the phrase’s portent. My novel substitution was the word “now”!

Kindly let me elucidate:

If my colleague says, “At this point in time I’m planning to rob a bank,” couldn’t he accomplish the same end by saying, “Now I’m planning to rob a bank?”

This example of simple semantic economy has several ramifying applications.

The phrase “at this point in time” contains five words with a total of 17 letters. “Now” is only one word and contains but three letters. And yet “now” expresses the same meaning as the longer phrase — amazing, isn’t it?!

If this colleague becomes our “leader,” he has a secretary. In that case, consider that a secretary could type “now” six times in the time it takes to type one “at this point in time.”

Such assiduous labor saving would clearly make life better for secretaries, save much paper, and reduce the reading time for recipients.

In a college in Massachusetts, which has mutated in the last seven decades so much as to be “now” almost unrecognizable to me, I sat in an ancient hall and reveled in the spoken words of Howard Mumford Jones.

Jones was a great “don.”

Lecturing us then on W. Somerset Maugham, Jones was not as adoring as were most of Maugham’s readers who merely enjoyed an accomplished storyteller. Jones said to us lads: “Young gentleman, when Mr. Maugham lapses into his ‘fancy writing,’ I positively gag! Maugham’s characters say such things as, ‘When I was out in India, I was by way of being a sanitation engineer.’ Gentlemen, what the hell is ‘by way of being’ something? The question is, was the man a sanitation engineer, or not? It’s (expletive deleted)!” Jones snorted, muttering an effective word that would no longer shock us at this point in … I mean, now.

Jones liked Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Jones enjoyed the word “concomitant,” perhaps because it expresses what only several other combined words can. In Jones’ exams, consisting of essay questions, I was sure to use “concomitant” at least once. This was homage to a master and to what he taught us.

George Bernard Shaw left a lot of money to a movement to “modernize English” by overhauling our strange archaic spelling in favor of shorter, logically fashioned words.

He ran into a beehive when implacable defenders of a tenuous status quo prolonged the ways we’ve been spelling “ough” words since Geoffrey Chaucer.

GBS said that dough should be spelled “doe,” though should be “tho,” through should be “thru,” cough should be “cawf,” tough should be “tuf,” bough should be “bow,” fought should be “fawt.” bought should be “bawt,” enough should be “enuf” — as in “enuf awreddy”, etc.

Patently, old G.B. Shaw at that point in time was by way of being premature in his ideas.

He once wrote a pretty Atlanta deb that he would like to father her child if the child could have his brains and her looks — but feared lest the result be the other way around!

About Roney:

Harvard’42—Distinguished Prof, Em.—UCF

2004 Fla. Alliance for the Arts award

(Assisted by beautiful wife Joy Roney)