15BEFORE WE CAN COMMUNICATEI HAVE BEEN ASKED TO WRITE ABOUT `THE PROBLEM OF COMmunication'; by which my inquirer meant `
15
BEFORE WE CAN COMMUNICATE
I HAVE BEEN ASKED TO WRITE ABOUT `THE PROBLEM OF COMmunication'; by which my inquirer meant `communication under modern conditions between Christians and the outer world'. And, as usually happens to me when I am questioned, I feel a little embarrassed by the simplicity and unexcitingness of the answer I want to give. I feel that what I have to say is on a cruder and lower level than was hoped for.My ideas about `communication' are purely empirical, and two anecdotes (both strictly true) will illustrate the sort of experience on which they are based.1. The old Prayer Book prayed that the magistrates might `truly and indifferently administer justice'. Then the revisers thought they would make this easier by altering indifferently to impartially. A country clergyman of my acquaintance asked his sexton what he thought indifferently meant, and got the correct answer, `It means making no difference between one chap and another.' `And what', continued the parson, `do you think impartially means?T 'Ah', said the sexton after a pause, `I wouldn't know that.'Everyone sees what the revisers had in mind. They were afraid that the `man in the pew' would take indifferently to mean, as it often does, `carelessly', without concern. They knew that this error would not be made by highly-educated people, but they thought it would be made by everyone else. The sexton's reply, however, reveals that it will not be made by the least educated class of all. It will be made only by those who are educationally in the middle; those whose language is fashionable (our elders would have said `polite') without being scholarly. The highest and lowest classes are both equally safe from it; and impartially, which guards the `middle' churchgoers from misunderstanding, is meaningless to the simple.
