“Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”
The first thing that came to mind when I read, “*Think up* your own way of speaking,” was the “picked out” that Orwell used in his prescriptive essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946): “These five passages have not been *picked out* because they are especially bad [. . .]” Simplicity, simplicity!
I am so introverted that I don’t see people very often. But one of the people I see about once a year is my brother-in-law of about 35 years. He has authoritarian personality, and constantly “pronounc[es] the phrases everyone else does.” Of course, not everyone who repeats talking points has authoritarian personality, but everyone with authoritarian personality not only repeats, but repeats verbatim. (See Professor Bob Altemeyer, retired, University of Manitoba). I find them abhorrent because using them displays intellectual laziness on the part of the user. Even if I haven’t heard/read about a particular one before anyone speaks it, I can always tell when I’m hearing one because of their vacuous nature. How can anyone think they’re free when someone else constantly speaks through them? I like what Erich Fromm said about this in (I think) “Escape from Freedom.” He said that to think an original thought does not mean to think a thought that no one else has ever thought. It means, rather, to arrive at a thought by reading and then thinking about what one has just read. It is true that, from time to time, we all repeat what others say and write, but the proper way to do it is to acknowledge the person by name.
Oh, no, don’t let anyone correct you for saying “predictifies”! I love making up words. One of the many reasons I love Faulkner is because of the way he uses language. In chapter 5 of “Light in August” (1932), Joe Christmas is in the present. Then in chapters 6 and 7 he goes back in time: “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears” (first paragraph, chapter 6). There it is: adjacenting, rather than adjacent, chimneys, not to speak of the compound words he is wont to use. (Notice, by the way, in chapter 8: “He took out the dead watch again and looked at it. The watch was dead because he had no chance to wind it.”) Finally, the opening pages of “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936) contain some of the finest writing I’ve ever come across in the English language. “Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and over-sweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house. Out of quiet thunderclap [. . .]” His word constructions remind me of extended adjective constructions in German. “The too tall chair” is an example of a short one; it obviates the need for a relative clause. It took me several hours to figure out the meaning of the first 3 pages of that novel. It is, for me, his very best. I think it is one that historians should read because it highlights the epistemological problems of doing history, especially the problem of memory.
While this lesson was perfectly clear on first hearing, I know I will need to revisit it several times over, its insights are deep, and vital. Outstanding in an exceptional series. Much gratitude, from a worried lover of language & spoken language professional.
Incestuous, circuitous are the words that come to mind. Then I laughed as I recognized that I was listening to you via the internet.
Oh, and what’s with the proliferation of folks speaking and writing using only letters and emojis rather than words? Dang, that’s annoying and so disrespectful imho 😉
Thank you for jump starting my imagination this morning.
“Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”
The first thing that came to mind when I read, “*Think up* your own way of speaking,” was the “picked out” that Orwell used in his prescriptive essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946): “These five passages have not been *picked out* because they are especially bad [. . .]” Simplicity, simplicity!
I am so introverted that I don’t see people very often. But one of the people I see about once a year is my brother-in-law of about 35 years. He has authoritarian personality, and constantly “pronounc[es] the phrases everyone else does.” Of course, not everyone who repeats talking points has authoritarian personality, but everyone with authoritarian personality not only repeats, but repeats verbatim. (See Professor Bob Altemeyer, retired, University of Manitoba). I find them abhorrent because using them displays intellectual laziness on the part of the user. Even if I haven’t heard/read about a particular one before anyone speaks it, I can always tell when I’m hearing one because of their vacuous nature. How can anyone think they’re free when someone else constantly speaks through them? I like what Erich Fromm said about this in (I think) “Escape from Freedom.” He said that to think an original thought does not mean to think a thought that no one else has ever thought. It means, rather, to arrive at a thought by reading and then thinking about what one has just read. It is true that, from time to time, we all repeat what others say and write, but the proper way to do it is to acknowledge the person by name.
Oh, no, don’t let anyone correct you for saying “predictifies”! I love making up words. One of the many reasons I love Faulkner is because of the way he uses language. In chapter 5 of “Light in August” (1932), Joe Christmas is in the present. Then in chapters 6 and 7 he goes back in time: “Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentiary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denim in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears” (first paragraph, chapter 6). There it is: adjacenting, rather than adjacent, chimneys, not to speak of the compound words he is wont to use. (Notice, by the way, in chapter 8: “He took out the dead watch again and looked at it. The watch was dead because he had no chance to wind it.”) Finally, the opening pages of “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936) contain some of the finest writing I’ve ever come across in the English language. “Her voice would not cease, it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and over-sweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house. Out of quiet thunderclap [. . .]” His word constructions remind me of extended adjective constructions in German. “The too tall chair” is an example of a short one; it obviates the need for a relative clause. It took me several hours to figure out the meaning of the first 3 pages of that novel. It is, for me, his very best. I think it is one that historians should read because it highlights the epistemological problems of doing history, especially the problem of memory.
While this lesson was perfectly clear on first hearing, I know I will need to revisit it several times over, its insights are deep, and vital. Outstanding in an exceptional series. Much gratitude, from a worried lover of language & spoken language professional.
Incestuous, circuitous are the words that come to mind. Then I laughed as I recognized that I was listening to you via the internet.
Oh, and what’s with the proliferation of folks speaking and writing using only letters and emojis rather than words? Dang, that’s annoying and so disrespectful imho 😉
Thank you for jump starting my imagination this morning.