by William H. Worrell
I HAVE spent most of my life in the study of useless things. Naturally I have been greatly embarrassed in explaining, or explaining away, what it was that I was doing as a college professor; and even before becoming one I had to explain to the folks back home what I was studying and studying to be. I am afraid that for awhile I allowed the idea to grow that I was studying the Bible, particularly with a view to showing that it was “true”; but conversation betrayed only too clearly that I was engaged rather in showing that it was not “true”; and though I had been a choir boy my childhood had given no hint of any inclination toward the ministry. At last the fact developed that I was engaged in studying languages, especially dead and remote ones.
“Billy,” said our old family physician, “what is the use of studying Hebrew and Arabic and those other languages which no one ever heard of? Why don’t you study something useful, like medicine?”
I was unable to find an answer to this question till an imp, or an angel, came to my aid and I heard myself say, “What is the good of studying medicine?”
“I brought you into the world,” said he, “and that was one use of medicine.”
“But what was the use of bringing me into the world,” I said, “unless I was going to do something afterwards?” You see, I was thinking of him only as an emergency repairman who came into action only when the regular course of life was interrupted by mechanical breakdowns.
When I came to Michigan as a freshman in the fall of 1899, Greek and Latin were required for the A.B. degree; and when I received that degree four years later, a diploma was handed to me which began Universitatis Reifublicae Michiganensium Procuratores et Professores Academici omnibus has literas perlecturis Salutem. Nevertheless even in those days the classics were regarded with growing suspicion, as the least useful of foreign languages, all of which were odious. Of course attempts were made to show that Greek and Latin were useful. For one thing, a great many English words were derived from them, and if you knew the classical word you didn’t need to look up the English word in the English dictionary. A beginners’ Greek book of those days, by a pioneer named, I think, Goodell, contained English sentences which were to be turned into Greek, employing incidentally Greek words which occurred in English. I remember some of those sentences: “The ladder makes a long mark on the head of the ancient mariner.” “The children are making ice in the corner of the museum.” “What is the diet of the she-goat?” Lawyers helped the pedagogues out by testifying to what Latin did for a lawyer; and the medics and pharmics could make similar declarations. Though well aware of the usefulness of Greek and Latin for an understanding of English, it would never have occurred to me to study them for that purpose. I would have said that they were fascinating, compelling, beyond anything in my experience.
In order to be useful apparently a thing had to be a means to something else; and when you had acquired that something else you still didn’t have anything really, because what you had was only good to get still another thing. Quite plainly then, the only things of real value were those which were good for nothing. The classics were an excellent example of this, and the extinct Semitic languages still better, if one liked that sort of thing. It was the business of universities to foster such studies because they had no place in a world of merely use ful interests.
At the top of the list of end products stood music. Men went to great trouble to devise precise and costly instruments and to learn to produce on them noises of arbitrary pitch and quality, arranged in certain patterns of succession. A great many people paid a lot of money to subject themselves to the agitation of the circumambient elastic gaseous medium set in motion by the jugglers of this apparatus, and not the best and sincerest of the listeners could have told you wherein the Great Good lay. Something lived here which was not at all like the means used to produce it; something begotten of physics and the soul of man; something which when born wore the halo of its heavenly origin.
There is a great danger to useless subjects in the pretended discovery of some practical application of them. Out of unions of the spirit and expediency are born such trolls as the marching school-bands with electric lights on their feet. Compulsory Greek and Hebrew in the theological seminaries did not produce scholarship among ministers generally, but rather a smoldering wrath which worked against the teaching of these subjects to persons who could have profited by it. The curtailment or abolition of Greek and Latin in the schools and colleges was perhaps the result of trying to teach these languages to everybody. The boys laughed at Goodell’s she-goat, but later on they voted against Greek. Since that time the study of Greek has become to many students almost legendary. Latin is still taught, but, to judge from the current textbooks for beginners, only at the cost of the subjunctive mood. That horrible fact of life is not presented in these books; its existence is not even hinted at. No subjunctive form, I suppose, appears anywhere in the reading material. These books abound in beautiful illustrations and rather pathetic appeals to interest of a very ordinary kind. I cannot help thinking of the austere pages of Comstock’s Latin Grammar and Frieze’s Vergil, which even now rise in my memory enveloped in a nimbus of glory all their own.
When I was in college I had a classmate in the Law Department who after graduation became very successful in the oil business. About thirty-five years later, long after I had ceased to think of him, he turned up in the middle of the summer session. He was kindly and rather wistful, and he studied me and my surroundings curiously. Finally he said, “Do you know, I thought of you as dead and forgotten years ago; and here you are, apparently a happy man. How did you manage to survive with the things you studied in college?” I could not tell him. But since then I have thought that if a man is unable to separate himself from the useless, and if he never, never turns aside, he will wear the world down, and it will let him alone; and if he improves with age and practice, he will have his field pretty well to himself and come to be envied, however briefly, by an oilman.
The University of Michigan expressed its opinion of the distinguished scholarship of William H. Worrell by making him the Henry Russel lecturer for 1941-41. He is one of Michigan’s own graduates (A.B. ’03; B.D., Hartford Theological Seminary, ’06; Strassburg, ’09), and his teaching career was largely spent at the Hartford Theological Seminary (1910-24) and at Michigan (1908-10, 1925-49), with some intervals for study and travel in Egypt and other Near Eastern lands. Recognized as one of the leading authorities on the Coptic language and people, he has numerous publications in this field to his credit. Since his retirement as Professor Emeritus of Semitics, Dr. Worrell has been living at Melbourne Beach, Florida.
This essay originally appeared in the Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review.
(A Side Note about the Worrell Uncial:
(http://um2017.org/faculty-
William H. Worrell designed the Worrell Uncial back in the 1930s. He designed it based on letterforms in the coptic manuscripts of the Freer Collection, owned by our papyrology lab. It appears that he first designed a hand set typeface in the 20s (which is totally lost) but then, in the 30s, in order to make printing a scholarly edition of the coptic manuscripts economically feasible, he worked with the Linotype corporation to design a new Uncial that would work in the line casting machine. Linotype took the project on during WWII, ultimately, as make work for the designers who weren’t fighting. It’s the only custom academic type they did.
Worrell donated a set of the linotype Matrices to UM in 1949(?). They were deposited in “the general library” and then promptly lost.
I don’t know of a complete set of the matrices left in the world. One half set is owned by the CC Sterne museum in Portland, the other half of that set is owned by Phil Driscoll, here in Michigan (Technically the mats belong to the Churchman family, but are on extended loan).
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