The Proof Is in The Pudding

I admired the late James Jackson Kilpatrick. He led an interesting life. He began his career as a newspaperman after earning a journalism degree from the University of Missouri in 1941. By 1950 he was the editor of The Richmond News Leader, succeeding the sainted Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman. A conservative, Kilpatrick was strongly opposed, on constitutional grounds, to the US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. He laid out his arguments in his first book, The Sovereign States: Notes of a Citizen of Virginia (1957). He advocated for the doctrine of interposition, which he traced back to Jefferson and Madison, in 1798.

In 1964 he began his syndicated column, A Conservative View, and he gave up his editorial duties in 1966. From that time on until his death in 2010, he earned his living as a man of letters, writing columns and books, appearing on television, and giving lectures.

If you are a certain age, you remember his television appearances during the point-counterpoint segment of 60 Minutes. This was always the last segment of the show, pitting the conservative Kilpatrick against the liberal Nicholas von Hoffman, and more memorably, the liberal Shana Alexander. And if you do not remember the show, you may well remember the parody of the show that was a regular skit on Saturday Night Live. Jane Curtin played the Shana Alexander role (“Dan, you pompous ass!”) while Dan Aykroyd played the James J. Kilpatrick role (“Jane, you ignorant slut!”).

I once attended a Kilpatrick lecture, and he commented on the point-counterpoint segment. He said that he despaired of ever convincing Alexander of the superior characteristics of the capitalist system. Then, one day, he found that he had, indeed, convinced her: she left the show for a higher-paying job!

Towards the end of his career, Kilpatrick devoted his columns to only two topics: the courts, and the English language. In the mid-1980s he published a book entitled The Writer’s Art that provided a catalog of his insights on writing well. One of the chapters was entitled “My Crotchets and Your Crotchets” and consisted of a compilation of mistakes writers made in the choice of specific words. One example was the confusion surrounding “affluent” and “effluent”. I was working at a paper mill at the time: I knew the difference. Another was the frivolous way that “absolute” words were treated. For example, “unique” means one of a kind. Something is either unique, or it is not. To this day, my skin crawls when I hear someone refer to a thing as “very unique”. “Unique” does not admit of a modifier.

I have a couple of crotchets that Kilpatrick did not include in his book. Sadly, I acquired these crotchets after repeated exposure to mid-level and senior-level managers of corporations who really should have known better, but for some reason did not. These two phrases were at one time trendy, and we all know managers tend to be trendy. But they drive me bananas. The phrases, that is. And, come to think of it, the managers as well.

The first is “walk the talk”. Taken by itself, the phrase is meaningless, a sure sign of a modest if not a poor education. Or it could be a sign of terminal trendiness. The phrase should have been written as “he can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk?” Even this sounds silly. What it refers to is a fellow who is pretty glib when it comes to bragging about his abilities, but a fellow about whom we have doubts as to whether he can deliver on his promises. (I prefer the more succinct “Put up or shut up.”) Apparently “he can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk” became too much of a chore for mid-level and upper-level managers to handle, so these captains of industry chopped the phrase down to something they could remember.

As aggravating as that phrase is to me, it pales beside “the proof is in the pudding”. This is total nonsense. Imagine Euclid beginning his proof of Book I Proposition 15, that vertical angles are congruent, with “We begin with a plum pudding.” The original sentence was “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” That does make sense. Is the pudding I made tastier than the pudding you made? We can answer the question with a few bites of each. This phrase is historical, and today is never used to judge the quality of puddings. Is the automobile that I designed superior to last year’s version? Let’s take it out on the track and find out. It is an argument against theories and an argument for hands-on testing. So why did this reasonable phrase get reduced to the nonsensical title of this post? See the paragraph above.

I am not happy about the extent to which our language is being corrupted. I have learned, however, that the world is largely indifferent to my unhappiness. And that applies doubly to mid-level and upper-level managers, to whom I am equally indifferent.