The Gold Insect
by EDGAR ALLAN POE
Being the "Gold Bug" put into Basic English

Put into Basic English by A. P. Rossiter

Psyche Miniatures, General Series No. 45
LONDON ; KEGAN PAUL. TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., Ltd. 1932

TO THE READER    

    Now that the ABC of Basic English and The Basic Words are printed, the system is before the public in a complete form; and the most important work before us is the selection of reading material that may be of use in connection with it. Poe's story, "The Gold Bug", in Basic is a first attempt to give the learner what is needed.
    It is possible to do this sort of work at a number of different levels for different sorts of readers. In Miss Lockhart's Carl and Anna no great trouble was taken to keep within fixed limits those special use to which the name of 'idiom' has been given -- groups whose sense is not clear from a knowledge of the words taken separately. In a general way, as may be seen from these earlier examples, the wider uses are clear enough in relation to the rest of the story ; and most writers may make the selection which seems best for their purpose. But the answers of our representatives in different countries to questions about the effect of writing freely on readers with only a little knowledge of English have been of great value for the ABC list of the 250 most necessary 'idioms'. In The Gold Insect only such as are given in that list have been used, so that here for the first time the Basic system may be seen fully at work, and its value in education may be judged.

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    Without some theory of ‘ idiom ’, it is clear that a simple or limited word list will not, by itself, make it possible for the learner to get any sort of English into his head quickly and well. The chief units in a given list may be put together in their natural order without much help from teachers or from books : the limits of sense will be chiefly those fixed by the physical behaviour of things. The use of words representative of ‘ fictions ’ is only a little harder (in love, anger, control, etc., but at war, rest, peace).
    But when some idea, natural enough to one person, is not present in the mind of another, we get a form of ‘ idiom’ that seems strange and even foolish till the picture at the back of it is made clear. In the same way, special uses may be caused by the loss of some of the words. These may quickly be made clear by giving the full form of the statement ; and after a time the learner himself gets into the way of using the shorter forms—only making the addition when there is some question about the sense.

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    These two groups have a tendency to get mixed in the lists of what are generally named ‘ idioms ’ in books on language ; and it is quite possible for the loss of the first expansion to be so complete that any number of different accounts may be given, all of which will have some uncertain relation to present—day use. ‘ Put up with ' is an example of a word—complex which might be given an expansion in ten different ways by ten different persons, not one of whom would be ready to say that his account was certain or complete. This important fact has been very frequently overlooked by those who take the ‘ word ’ as the only teaching unit, and whose pages are full of theories about its ‘ varieties of meaning’, ‘ semantic multiplicity ’, and so on. The word has no values when not in use ; and what is commonly named the ' sense ’ of a word is more like the complex colour that one sees when a coloured card is slowly turning in a circle. If the attention is fixed on any one colour we may be conscious that it is there ; at the same time it is only when our attention is limited in this way, and only by a wrong use of words, that we say that it is the colour of the card.

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    A boy does not get two words ‘ earth ’ into his head -- one a dirty substance, the other the Ball of Geography teachers ; from the start the two uses are mixed, and to him the ‘ earth ’ is that which goes round the sun, given the name because it is clearly formed out of the substance. If he is forced by the books to make two words of one, such books will be kept on the shelf as long as possible.
    Among all the turns and twists of sense and use, the idea of a representative selection is an Ariadne’s thread to get the learner away from those strange beings who are responsible for books on language. It is possible to get down to the root sense every time, and to put it into simple words, with the Basic list. But the outcome may seem round-about, and sometimes heavy, to one whose natural language is English. To the learner tired of schools and authorities, and to the man in need of an international system for the exchange of ideas, it may, on the other hand, be of greater value. And the working out of a

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small list of special uses makes it possible for reading material to be produced which to not unpleasing to the most delicate English ear, and which is only a little more trouble to the learner himself. At the worse, the 250 fixed word—groups may be looked on as additions to the Basic list. That is still a long way from any system in competition with Basic, and no one will have the face to say that all of the 250 are as unprobable as the word ‘scissors".
    If every writer was able to make the selection which seemed best to him, nothing would be certain ; any one man’s ideas would have equal authority with those of any other. To one, " don’t put yourself out " might be as clear as " it’s in the way " to another it might have no sense without an expansion. The Basic list of Fixed Word-groups gives us a way out of these private decisions, and as more books in Basic are printed, the small number of unnecessary uses may be changed into others which come more readily to the tongue. In the same way, changes have been made in the 850 words themselves, with the help of our representatives in all countries. Attention has to be given to the work done by words and word-groups

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in everyday talk. Certain senses have to be covered, or the system is no use for international purpose. If a thing is well done by one group, there is no need for another covering the same field. The question of delicate shades may come up again at a later stage. The great need of today is, in Lord Melbourne’s words, that we may all be able to say the same thing.
    It is clearly a waste of time to become expert in the theory of swimming hand-over-hand, before we are safe in the water : and the only purpose of most learners is to be able to take a short swim ; they will certainly have no chance of going in for competition with experts.
    In the present story, the question of form is not very important. “ The Gold Bug " is the first of thousands of straight-forward stories, with the same apparatus for giving the reader the idea that someone is unbalanced or off his head, the same account of all his doings by one of the chief actors, and the slow up—take of the more-or-less foolish person who is giving us the story. Legrand is the father of Sherlock Holmes (even to his knowledge of science), and the man who gives the account has more than a touch of the slow—minded Watson, so necessary to getting the heart out of a story of discovery while keeping the reader pleased with himself.

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    The language is complex, stiff, and frequently not that of our time. In putting " The Gold Bug " into French, Baudelaire is quietly cruel with Poe’s thick masses of words. " The mortification consequent upon " becomes " L'humiliation de " : " of an abstruseness ten thousand times greater " becomes " dix mille fois plus compliqués " : Kidd’s “ coadjutors " become simply “ sea aides " ; and so on.
    Such language is almost as hard as that of Shakespeare for anyone who has no knowledge of English. He may get some sort of sense from the parallel words in his language ; but there is no ready way of getting an idea of the degree of distance of a given word from everyday talk and writing -- its dangers in untrained hands. The young English reader may make sense of the strange things which he comes across in his reading, by a comparison with everyday language ; but this is only possible for those who have a knowledge of normal English.

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    In Shakespeare, the fact that words which are strange are mixed with others more clear is a necessary part of his art ; in Poe the only effect of such words is to make the sense of a straightforward account of facts dark and uncertain. Without them there is no loss to the story. “ The Gold Bug " is not dependent for its effect on that strange sense of ever—present danger produced by an expert hand in " The Black Cat ", “ The Fall of the House of Usher ", “ The Pit and the Pendulum " or “ The Cask of Amontillado ". This story, like " The Purloined Letter " and “ Marie Roget " (where we have an early form of Mycroft Holmes) has been the work of thought. Its slow motion and long words, which are signs that Poe was a reader of Sir Thomas Brown (and got a trick or two from him for producing the feeling of the dark and of the shades of death) have no special point in these stories. When a picture of the country is given, it seems to be there by chance, and to be no help to the story ; while the over-frequent weight of the talk, the self-important language of Legrand’s account are representative of the early days of American writing, still uncertain of itself, and still keeping to the old ways of English men of letters.

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    When such things are cut out, the story is as good as ever. Its value like that of all good crime stories comes from the changes in the rhythm -- now making the interest stronger with the suggestion of waiting, now jumping forward with a quick and surprising turn. We are so used to our Thorndike and other experts that 'today' even Homes seems to us unprobable, and Poe's errors in chemistry and mathematics may be a cause of amusement. We may even be pleased that Captain Kidd was not bad at writing and did not put 'Ye' in place of 'the'. For all this, "The Gold Bug"¹ is still a good story, and, in its place between Voltaire's Zadig and Wilkie Collins², an important landmark in the development of the school of fiction which is based on crime and on police records. It is the hope and belief of those who have put it into Basic that for the international reader, no less than for English boys and girls, these pages give all that is of value in Poe's somewhat unequal work.

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1. Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was an American author, poet, editor best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre.
2. William Wilkie Collins (1824 – 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. His best-known works are early detective mysteries, The Woman in White and The Moonstone.

C. K. Ogden.

The Orthological Institute,
10, King's Parade, Cambridge.

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NOTE

    Early this year (1932), when I was in Japan, I had a letter from Mr. H. E. Palmer, a language expert in connection with the Membusho, or Education Office of the Japanese Government, to which he made the suggestion that I might put "The Gold Bug" into Basic English. He himself was getting it out in another form, with a word-list of 3,000 root-words, and the idea was to put the two stories side by side for the general purposes of the science of language teaching.
    The first copy was made by Phyllis Rossiter and myself, using only the Basic word-list, without making any attempt to take in a limited number (25) of fixed word-groups ('idioms') such as may be seen in the ABC of Basic English, which have been the only ones use in making this book.
    A certain number of words that are not Basic have been used in The Gold Insect ; but all of them have been given expansions, in Basic, on the first page on which they come. In some parts different words were put in to take the place of those in Poe's story. For example, thurible and crucifix in place of 'censor' and 'cross' (p 43).
    The point of these changes is to keep the learner in other countries from getting mixed up later, when he come to the more important 'censor', and the general sense of 'cross' (e.g. 'go over'). The two words are special church-uses, very uncommon form the learner's or the international point of view. But for this and the putting right of some of Poe's slips this is the complete story, the material is quite unchanged.

A. P. Rossiter.

August, 1932.

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THE GOLD INSECT


    Some years back I had a friend, a Mr. William Legrand. He came of an old Huguenot family, and had been well-off at the time ; but a number of loses, one after another, had made him poor. He went away from New Orleans (where his family had been for a very long time) to get away from his unhappy memories and bitter thoughts, and went to Sullivan's Island, near Charleston, South Carolina.
    The island is a very uncommon one. It is made up almost completely of the sea sand, and is about three miles long. It is not more than a quarter of a mile wide anywhere. It is cut off from the land by a very narrow inlet of water which makes its way slowly through wet waste lands covered with water grasses, where there are numbers of water birds. The plants on the island are poor and of small size, as is natural in such a place. No great trees are seem there. The sharp palmetto¹ may be seen at Fort Moultrie,
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1 . A tree very common in South Carolina, which is named "The Palmetto State". The leaves are long, and have sharp points.
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Last updated July 27, 2012.