"Useless Knowledge"

Discouraged by a steady decline in the number of U. S. students studying languages, and by the racial and religious discriminations against teachers in other lands --which they deplored*--2,500 members of the Modern Language Association met for their 55th convention last week in Manhattan. On hand to comfort them with a puckish ode to "useless knowledge" was Dr. Joseph Wood Krutch, literary critic and English professor at Columbia University.

"You have at the present time," said he, "a new reason for being proud. The scholar is supposed to be a man who has renounced the world. But the world has very seldom seemed more eminently worth renouncing. . . . The Modern Language Association's only object is the accumulation of useless knowledge, and of useless knowledge at least one thing may be said --it never did anyone any harm. . . . Some day when a little child climbs upon your knee to ask: 'Grandpa, what did you do during the Great War?' you are going to be very lucky if you can reply: 'Child, I studied the subjunctive mood.' "

M. L. A.'s pleased delegates proceeded to trade each other all sorts of useless knowledge. From Harold W. Bentley, managing editor of American Speech, they got a report on names of U. S. towns and cities. Samples: Social Circle, Wide Mouth, Jingo, Sleepy Eye, Matrimony, Hot Coffee. University of Virginia's Professor Atcheson L. Hench delivered a scholarly discourse on the history of the term "stark-naked" (from start-naked, literally: buttocks-naked). Most superbly useless piece of information given to the convention was a paper on The Pronunciation of German Surnames in Potosi, Wisconsin.

* American Association of Teachers of German, meeting just before M. L. A., had squelched a resolution of sympathy with "victims of fanaticism in Germany." In protest, the New York City chapter threatened to secede from A. A. T. G.

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