The Written Word - The Competition Is Getting Rougher for This Respected but Endangered Species

MY FRIEND and correspondent Duke Russell writes to ask me the meaning of the French term au pair . What made him curious, he says, was finding this notice on a post office bulletin board:

“European girl looking for an au pair job,” followed by a telephone number.

Russell says he couldn’t find the phrase in his Larousse French dictionary. Neither could I in mine. But in the context of the notice, I thought, it probably meant a job as a maid or perhaps governess.

I looked it up in Webster’s New World and found this: Its literal meaning in French is “as an equal . . . of or in an arrangement in which services are exchanged . . . as an au pair girl who helped with the housework in exchange for room and board.”

I remembered that my French daughter-in-law had been working as an au pair in a Beverly Hills home when my younger son, then a student at UCLA, met her. I decided to call her and ask her what it meant.

“Mr. Smith,” she said, “what it means is cheap European slave labor.”

More provocative than the meaning of au pair , though, was Russell’s stationery. It was a blue half-sheet with this heading in bold black type: “WRITE IT--don’t say it!”

Russell believes in the written word, just as I do. But, of course, today the telephone is handier and faster in business and other affairs, including romance. All one has to do is call one’s inamorata and say “How ya doin’?” without engaging in the writing of poetic love letters.

Imagine anyone writing today as Lord Nelson did to his mistress, Emma, on the eve of Trafalgar: “My dearest beloved Emma, the dear friend of my bosom. The signal has been made that the Enemy’s Combined Fleet are coming out of Port. . . . May the God of Battles crown my endeavors with success. . . .”

Nelson did not survive his victory. Today, he could simply dial Emma (ship to shore) and say, “Hey, Emma. How ya doin’? Big battle tomorrow. Hope to see ya.”

Meanwhile, I have a note from my colleague, Bob Oates, The Times’ pro-football analyst, that seems pertinent to these questions: “Maybe I’m wrong,” he says, “but it seems to me that it’s been some time since I heard anyone called well-read. Possibly it was always a specious expression, but it is more likely that it was once apt in certain circumstances but now merely outdated. The equivalent person today who keeps up with ‘Jeopardy,’ ‘Roseanne’ and Johnny Carson is probably thought of as well-tubed. I’m beginning to think that it isn’t just football players who can’t read.”

I hadn’t thought of it, but Oates is right; the expression well-read has vanished. In my father’s day, a man was called well-read if he read the Bible, the works of Edgar Allen Poe and a series of literary pamphlets called the Little Blue Books. Much of my education rests on my father’s Little Blue Books. Of course, he was really well-read, since he was a non-believer and had read Robert Ingersoll, H. L. Mencken and Bertrand Russell, all of whom expressed an unpopular skepticism about gods in general.

I suppose that I can claim to be well-read, since my wife and I have been members of the Book of the Month Club for about 40 years. I’m afraid, though, that during that time we’ve rejected more books than we’ve accepted.

I have a library which, if I had read every book in it, would probably justify my thinking of myself as well-read. However, a great many of my books were purchased with the notion that I ought to read them. But when I go to bed and have an hour of reading time, I am likely to be seduced away from Stephen Hawking’s “Brief History of Time” by one of the detective stories of Robert B. Parker or Elmore Leonard, books that are loaded with suspense, violence and sex. (You really ought to read Parker’s “Looking for Rachel Wallace” and Leonard’s “Split Images,” even if you haven’t read Darwin’s “The Origin of Species.”)

Because I am interested in history, I have been reading Will Durant’s “Story of Civilization” series ever since he began writing it, before World War II, with the first of his 13 volumes. However, when Dr. Durant died, he was through “The Age of Napoleon,” and I am still in “The Renaissance.”

Well-read or not, in some ways I have made the transition to contemporary life. I work on a computer, I watch sex and violence on television almost every night, and as long as Bob Oates writes about football, I will be well-read in that field.