The Voices Page has a neat "letter of the month" campaign that we particularly enjoy. But the editorial page has got that beat. For this week we received the letter of the year.
Our friendly correspondent didn't email. Or twit. He wrote an actual letter. Complete with envelope and stamp. And he didn't write about politics or business or North Korea or social media--nor God and man and law. Instead, he wrote about writing. And about something we wrote. Which are two of our favorite subjects. Hey, we love talking about us!
His treasured note and rare communique concerned an expression oft seen in this column: "told with the bark off." And how, according to our correspondent, we're telling it wrong, bark or no bark. And like the best of debaters, he backs up his words with expert opinion. And some expert he came up with.
Our friend pulled up an old column from none other than William Safire. And not only a William Safire column, but one of his "On Language" columns. Uh-oh. We knew we were in trouble then.
This decades-old column took up where a president named Lyndon Johnson left off. For old LBJ often told it with the bark off, and used that expression. Mr. Safire said the former president had it bass-ackwards. (Our phrase. Certainly not Mr. Safire's.)
William Safire quoted Twain, which is always smart, who may have had it right when he said, in his wonderful book Roughing It, Brigham Young's words on polygamy "is the word with the bark on it."
"Seems simple enough," Mr. Safire concludes.
"With the bark on is the natural state. So how did the bark off get started, tripping up both president and pundit? Probably not from the expression to take the bark off, meaning 'to chastise, lambaste, flog the skin off a man or beat the bark off a tree.' More likely, the expression that led to the confusion was to talk the bark off a tree, a talent for persuasion no less effective than charming the birds out of the trees, but with the use of profanity at the top of one's lungs.
"Let's straighten this metaphor out here and now, once and for all: If 'plain talk' is meant, leave the bark on. Any other way is barking up the wrong tree."
So there's the expert opinion. From expert of experts.
Unfortunately for Gentle Reader and Valued Correspondent, we can't promise to remember which is right, bark on or bark off. We can't even follow simple AP style in this column. It's too limiting.
Or as an old editor once told us when we tried to gently explain that he spelled a particular politician's name wrong in about a dozen places in an editorial: That's our style, dammit!
He always told it with the bark off.
Editorial on 06/23/2018