Hello everyone how we doing today ^^
Let's have a normal conversation
posted in
Off Topic
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English
language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by con-
scious action do anything about it. Our civilisation is decadent, and our lan-
guage-so the argument runs-must inevitably share in the general collapse.
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental
archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aero-
planes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural
growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
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 indef-
initely. 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 revers-
ible. 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 i
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially
bad-I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen-but because they illus-
trate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little
below the average, but are fairly representative samples. I number them so
that I can refer back to them when necessary:
-
I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton
who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not
become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien
(sic) 1 to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him
to tolerate. -
Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of
idioms which prescribes such egregious collocations of vocables as the
Basic put up with for tolerate or put at a loss for bewilder.
Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa). -
On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not
neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they
are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in
the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter
their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreduc-
ible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself
is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall
the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic?
Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or
fraternity?
Discord