Words of wisdom about words and wisdom

From a very thoughtful, poignant essay, "Words", in the New York Review of Books:

Cultural insecurity begets its linguistic doppelgänger. The same is true of technical advance. In a world of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter (not to mention texting), pithy allusion substitutes for exposition. Where once the Internet seemed an opportunity for unrestricted communication, the increasingly commercial bias of the medium—”I am what I buy”—brings impoverishment of its own. My children observe of their own generation that the communicative shorthand of their hardware has begun to seep into communication itself: “people talk like texts.”

This ought to worry us. When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Alice was right: the outcome is anarchy.

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”

Read the entire piece.

"Learn to write well, or not to write at all." — Dryden (Essay on Satire)

"I confess then, that I attempt to be one of those who write because they have made some progress, and who, by means of writing, make further progress." — St. Augustine (Letter, 143)

Comments

[LJ]

There is also a deliberate assault on language in certain quarters, for very specific reasons.

On the one hand, words have been interchanged for the purpose of obfuscation, to conceal meaning and real intent. This has been the constant pattern of the left for many years. They have been progressives, liberals, occasionally socialists and most recently have taken up the progressive mantle once more. Why? In their case it is simply a matter of deception. Were their true aims, their larger long-term goals explained with clarity, the majority of Americans would reject them. But incrementally they have been very successful.

But there is also the deliberate hi-jacking of words to change their meaning for socio-political purposes. That is the essence of the "marriage" debate ongoing. Instinctively, most people realize that the re-definition of marriage destroys the very social bedrock that the word represents. Culturally, there is no equivalent to what that word has meant over the centuries and that has been reflected in the law. The proponents of "same-sex marriage" often ask the rhetorical question, "how does it in any way affect your marriage if gays are given the same opportunity?"

That question is almost unanswerable in its magnitude. Changing the definition of that word "marriage" carries reverberations deep into the soul of society. We either accept the damage, create a new word or refuse to allow the re-definition.