friday, October 24, 1975
page 10
arts &
bernstein on worfs
Stickler sounds of silence
A lighthearted look at love
The subject is love next Wednesday at 8
pan. in Kimball Recital Hall. That's when
the Royal Shakespeare Company brings
Pleasure and Repentance to town for the
second production of the UN L Performing
Arts Series.
Billed as a lighthearted look at love, the
program brings together poetry, prose and
song from around the world and across the
ages. Company member Terry Hands de
vised the show.
"A Description of Love," by Sir Walter
Raleigh, opens and closes the two-part
show. Between the two readings, diversity
is the production's keynote.
Selections from the works of Shake
speare, John Keats and John Donne are
balanced by lesser known pieces by Mickey
Spillane, the Rolling Stones and an 8-year-old
girl named Marjory Fleming.
Among songs in the program are
"Cotton Eye Joe," an American traditional
tune, and "So We'll Go No More A'roving,"
by Lord Byron, with music composed by
Martin Best. Bill Homewood sings and
plays guitar.
Lynette Davies, David Suchet and Hugh
Sullivan do the acting chores in Pleasure
and Repentance. Davies has played Regan
in King Lear, Lady Macbeth, and worked
with Peter Brooks in his production of
Midsummer Nigh t 's Dream.
Suchet played the king in the
company's Love's Labours Lost, which
played in Omaha last spring. Sullivan has
appeared in the company's productions as
Rcss in Macbeth, Hastings in The Wars of
the Roses and as Kokol in Peter Brook's
production of MaratjSade.
The Royal Shakespeare Company is
headquartered in Stratford-on-Avon, birth
place of the Bard. The first theater opened
in 1879, but was destroyed by fire in 1926.
The rebuilt theater is still in use.
The company's financial support has
come from Queen Elizabeth since 1971
when it was subsidized by the English
nation.
By Theodore M. Bernstein
Sticklerian again. "Has the strike been
called off, have the pickets been removed?"
the justice asked. There was no answer. "1
hear silence," the justice said. That passage
from a newspaper article prompt a reader
to ask, "How can you hear silence?"
The answer is that logically and tech
nically you can't, but figuratively and
idiomatically you can. The question brings
to mind a sentence that was cited a couple
of columns ago: "All children are not
neat."
Logically and literally that should mean
that there isn't a neat child in the world,
but no one but a stickler would read it that
way.
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A word about they. "Everyone wishes
they were rich." To most educated people
these days that use of they sounds wrong
and frequently a demand is raised for a
hs-she inclusive pronoun that can be used
in that kind of sentence.
Some students of words, such as Ethel
Strainchamps, maintain that such a pro
nous already exists and has existed since
Modern English began; the pronoun these
students cite is they.
Surprisingly enough, some important
dictionaries, including the Oxford and the
Merriam-Webster second and third addi
tions, agree. In the Oxford one definition
of they is: "often used in reference to a
singular noun made universal by every.
any, no, etc., or applicable to one of either
sex."
it is true that in the early days of the
language they was used in that way, but, as
George 0. Curme notes in "Syntax," a
scholarly text, "This older literary usage
survives in loose colloquial and popular
speech."
The implication is that it does not sur
vive in careful educated speech or writing.
And that implication is substantially cor
rect, though the locution does appear in
some educated writing.
In the opening sentence above if "he or
she"sounds awkward, which it usually
does, you might reconstruct the sentence,
making it, for example, "Everyone wishes
to be rich."
Word oddities. An overused word these
days is syndrome, which means a collection
of symptoms or characteristics that mark a
certain condition.
You wouldn't think there would be any
thing unusual about the pronunciation of
the word, but Webster's Second Edition
gives the first pronunciation syn-dro-me,
with its secondary sound (in medicine) as
syn-drome.
The Webster third edition, however,
gives it as syn-drome, with a secondary pro
nunciation of syn-dro-me. Thus do even
dictionaries reverse themselves.
(c) 1975 Theodore M. Bernstein
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