Words Worth Noting - October 14, 2022

“So much must be said against the man of fashion. But, in fairness to him, it must be admitted that he is not alone in being frivolous: other classes of men share the reproach. Thus for instance, bishops are generally frivolous, moral teachers are generally frivolous. Philosophers and poets are often frivolous; politicians are always frivolous. For if frivolity signifies this lack of grasp of the fulness and the value of things, it must have a great many forms besides that of mere levity and pleasure-seeking. A great many people have a fixed idea that irreverence, for instance, consists chiefly in making jokes. But it is quite possible to be irreverent with a diction devoid of the slightest touch of indecorum, and with a soul unpolluted by a tinge of humour.... To say a thing with a touch of humour is not to say it in vain. To say a thing with a touch of satire or individual criticism is not to say it in vain. To say a thing even fantastically, like some fragment from the scripture of Elfand, is not to say it in vain. But to say a thing with a pompous and unmeaning gravity; to say a thing so that it shall be at once bigoted and vague; to say a thing so that it shall be indistinct at the same moment that it is literal; to say a thing so that the most decorous listener shall not at the end of it really know why in the name of all things you should have said it or he should have listened to it – this is veritably and in the weighty sense of those ancient Mosaic words to take that thing in vain. The Name is taken in vain many times more often by preachers than it is by secularists.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Frivolous Man” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # March-April 2022