“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”

Henry Ford on the witness stand in 1919 during his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, quoted in Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes [which as I may have complained before was in fact big and blue]. These words are the apparently origin of his supposed “History is bunk”, and I quote them not because I agree but on the contrary because they embodies a typical progressive fatuity that nothing ever mattered before yet what we do can matter by sheer force of will... and because I want to add that in The Illusion of Technique William Barrett quoted it as “History is the bunk”, which I find interesting because older uses of that term invariably seem to have it as “the bunk” and if anyone knows how or why it got shortened or what the original reference even was I would be interested.

In my latest Epoch Times column I take aim at the government’s self-deceiving reliance on “continue” to describe things they are not even trying to do and would not know how to start trying.

Journalist W.R. “Titterton tells of an interview with the Aga Khan, in which His Highness said that if a wall fell and crushed his foot he would exclaim: ‘This is the best thing that could have happened to me.’ To which Chesterton responded, ‘Then I feel inclined to retort that the Persian language must be singularly deficient in expletives.’”

An author whose name I failed to record in Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 2 #6 Issue 15 (April-May, 1999)

“Sir, Friends of the vanishing apostrophe should start with Westminster City Council, whose vans carry the message: ‘Were working for a cleaner City.’ Yours faithfully, PAMELA HUTCHINSON, 6 Cleveland Gardens, W2, March 12.”

Letter in the Times March 14, 1984 [sent to me by my father, a connoisseur of all things rhetorical including sloppy usage and its foes]

“As modern words are actually used, there is hardly a shade of difference left between meaning well and meaning nothing.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly October 25, 1934, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 1922 [and if you’re thinking wow, someone who could describe current conditions so exactly nearly a hundred years ago must have understood the underlying processes at work very well, I couldn’t agree more].

“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

“It was from Hitchens, for example, that I learned the great definition of ‘the upper crust’ as ‘a load of crumbs held together by dough’ – Bolshevist, to be sure, but lovely.”

Michael Potemra reviewing Christopher Hitchens’ new anthology, mostly favourably, in National Review February 24, 2005

In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why we talk a lot less about free speech than we used to, and a lot less convincingly.