Plain Talk
I am obsessed by the purity of language. This might be because I learnt English the hard way, studying Nesfield's English Grammar or because my graduate studies were in philology.
And so I am often exasperated by the state of the English language. Whether in the press, books or the media the standard of English, in vocabulary and syntax, is going down hill.
One used to talk about the authority of language. "Authority," according to Robert Nesbit, "unlike power or coercion, is not rooted in force, or threat of force. It is built into the very fabric of society".
The authority of language is the most fundamental to the social bond and to culture. Indeed no community, no culture can exist without language. True there are nonverbal languages, such as music and painting, but throughout the history of humanity, language in the verbal sense has been crucial. These days there seems to be a retreat from language.
Going through modern publications in English one cannot but notice the linguistic corruption. This international corruption comes under the guise of search for the simple or colloquial. It is a sabotage of all that is authoritative in language.
Robert Nesbit writes in an article in Encounter that the erosion of the authority, and community of language can be seen "in the semi-illiterate and hence language hating ranks of militants for whom a single four letter word, endlessly repeated, can be the stock of political attack and also, at the same time, of withdrawal from the toils and traps of a language they fear."
In Language and Silence George Steiner writes about "the retreat from the word", the background of the current erosion of English, and any other language for this matter. He believes that large areas of meaning and praxis now belong to such non-verbal languages as mathematics, symbolic logic and formulas of chemical and electronic relations -- "the world of words has shrunk."
The sphere and authority of language in society are shrinking. Steiner explains why no later writer has ever displayed the vocabulary that Shakespeare did. The language of Shakespeare and Milton, argues Steiner, "belongs to a stage of history in which words were in natural control of experienced life. The writer of today tends to use far fewer and simpler words, both because mass culture has watered down the concept of literacy and because the sum of realities of which words can give a necessary and sufficient account has sharply diminished."
I was intrigued to find close similarities between these ideas which were expounded in 1967 and Galal Amin's recent The Age of Masses. In his deeply researched and courageous analysis, Amin writes about the effect of mass media in the debasement of language and thought of cultural life in Egypt.
Another of my favourite writers cum philosophers is Tocqueville and his revealing and quite revolutionary book Democracy in America. Although the book was published in 1835, it remains valid, demonstrating how politics is usually coached in cultural and literary terms. Tocqueville writes "these abstract terms which abound in democratic languages and which are used on every occasion without attaching them to any particular fact, enlarge and obscure the thoughts they are intended to convey; they render the mode of speech more succinct and the idea contained in it less clear. But with regard to language democratic nations prefer obscurity to labour."
Men living in democratic countries, expounds Tocqueville, are able to entertain unsettled ideas, and they require loose expressions to convey them. As they never know the idea they express today will be appropriate to the new positions they may occupy tomorrow, they naturally acquire a liking for abstract terms.
George Orwell described the use of language in ideological and political situations: "The mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.... Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectful."
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 10 - 16 July 2003 (Issue No. 646)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/646/cu3.htm