"The Screwtape Letters" is not an egg salad sandwich.

In yesterday's Boardwalk Café, Saint Croix said:

I should have said this in the Scalia post — the devil made me not do it — but one of the interesting things about The Screwtape Letters is the insight that a devil is simply an angel with free will.

Thus if you believe in an afterlife — and an overwhelming number of people believe in an afterlife — you should acknowledge devils. They are simply angels who are in rebellion with God. Which God allows, because God believes in free will for humanity.

What a fantastic book The Screwtape Letters is.

I would pay money for Althouse to blog that book!

Pay money to get me to blog about something? That's been done... to get me to eat an egg salad sandwich. I'd written a post — back in 2005 — listing "10 things I've never done," and #2 was "Eaten egg salad, devilled eggs, or cold hard-boiled eggs" — hmm, interesting second appearance of the Devil in this post! — and somehow that led to my saying you'd have to pay me $200 to eat an egg salad sandwich, and some commenters got together and collected $200 and PayPal'd it to me, and I blogged — vlogged! — The Eating of the Egg Salad Sandwich.

But I didn't want to eat an egg salad sandwich. Reading the "Screwtape Letters" is something I would like to do. I read it years ago — and I'm old so that "years ago" in the history of Althouse is almost half a century ago — but I'd like to read it again, especially with the ability to blog it and the context of Scalia's recent remarks about it.

So I added it to my Kindle. You can add it too: here. And if you use that link, you'll be sending me a little money (without paying more). If you like this blog, you can funnel money to me by entering Amazon through the Althouse portal and buying something, anything, at some point before clicking away. But to get me to blog on specific topics, you could attempt the Egg Salad Method. That might work for some things — bloggable, vloggable things, for the right price. You could also just ask, as Saint Croix did, and it might work, if I'm interested enough. This blog is all and only about what interests me.

So I bought "The Screwtape Letters" and read a few pages last night. Here's the first thing I highlighted, and I'll put it here out of context, because you know that I like isolating sentences from their context — so sue me — for the purposes of discussion. That's what we did last winter with The Gatsby Project, which actually has one post that got the "egg salad" tag. It was the post with the "salads of harlequin designs." Remember?

I'm not saying these "Screwtape Letters" posts will only be isolated sentences in the manner of The Gatsby Project. But I am getting us started with this sentence, as the devil Screwtape advises his nephew devil on how to screw with some human being, referred to as "the patient":

"By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?"

"People Get Ready."

A fabulous 1965 recording by The Impressions. Don't confuse it with "Get Ready," by The Temptations, which is a completely different song. Some people even confuse The Impressions and The Temptations. "Get Ready," from 1966, was written by Smokey Robinson. (Here's how Smokey did it in 1979.)

As you may have noticed, I got absorbed with the word "get" earlier today. "Let's get out of here" and "You just don't get it, do you?" are 2 famously recurrent lines in movies. In the comments, I was saying:

"Get" — the word in both cliche lines — is a funny word. I've noticed that professional writers -- e.g. lawyers -- will replace the word "get" whenever they can (with seemingly more proper words like "obtain" and "acquire" and "depart" or "arrive"). It's like it's not a regular word. It's so useful we shouldn't use it.

And:

"You just don't get it" is a fascinating phrase. It was huge during the Clarence Thomas hearings. Do you remember? It's used to exert psychological pressure. You're trying to persuade someone that a particular viewpoint is correct, and you're jumping to this level of disgust and disbelief, essentially telling the person that they are dumb and isolated from all the people who already understand. It's not just that you don't agree with me already, you're some kind of outcast.

St. Croix said avoiding the word "get" is "a class thing," and professionals who avoid it are trying to sound "high class," trying "to impress." That made me do a little search to see whether the Supreme Court suppresses the word "get," and found it in only one third of the cases in the past year. Often it was a quote, like "Have you ever tried to get cow s*** out of a Prada purse?" (which is a cute low/high mix). Justice Scalia began a dissenting opinion with: "Let me get this straight..." (which might be taken as a deliberate working-class affectation). I'm seeing the word used in colloquial phrases like "get around," "get it backwards," and "get it right." Following natural speech patterns, "get" would appear much more frequently, so I say there's active suppression.

I ran across the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sentence about free speech and the marketplace of ideas:

"But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out."

Imagine what the standard present-day legal editor would do to that sentence: the best test of truth is the power of the thought to gain acceptance in the competition of the market. (The editor would also try to purge the passive voice by fiddling around with the subject — maybe it should be "competition" — toying with the notion of making "test" the verb, and fretting over whether "test" and "market" amount to a mixed metaphor.)

Lawyers and judges just don't get that "get" is a fine word that shouldn't be replaced by boring longer words. When it comes up naturally, as you'd use it in speech, that's where it belongs. It feels natural because it's won in the marketplace of people talking to each other over the centuries, carrying out their affairs in real time. "Got" is true.

As I said, I got — got! — absorbed in the word "get" today, and I got — got! — interested in figuring what's the best song with the word "get." A marketplace of "get" songs. "People Get Ready" won. (Look at how many cover versions there are!) Other contenders — in addition to the above-mentioned "Get Ready" — are: "I'll Get You"/"Get Back"/"Getting Better"/"Got to Get You Into My Life" (The Beatles), "Get It While You Can" (Janis Joplin), "Get Off of My Cloud" (The Rolling Stones), "Get on the Floor" (Michael Jackson), "I Get Around" (The Beach Boys); "Can I Get a Witness" (Marvin Gaye), "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" (The Animals).... That's just stuff easily picked from my 1960s-leaning iPod.

My point is: What a hard, sharp word! Use it.

(And: "People Get Ready" = sublime.)