Were Losing
Shakespeare!
When
I was in high school, preparing for the
intellectual challenge of college, I took pains to strengthen my
vocabulary. I became a stickler for the proper use of words that are
commonly misused: transpire, infer, and enormity,
for example.
But a funny thing happened.
Instead of increasing my ability to communicate, I found myself
linguistically isolated. When I used these words in what the books assured
me was the correct sense, nobody understood me! I had
learned, in effect, to speak a useless private language! I wound up avoiding
many of the words Id worked so hard to acquire. To be consistently
correct was to be a crank.
When I got to college, my
linguistics professor explained that language is in constant flux, and that
as incorrect usages become prevalent, they eventually
become correct. Words only mean what people agree that
they mean; there is no real meaning vouchsafed by the
dictionary. Dictionaries only tell you what words have meant in the past;
they cant prescribe what theyll mean in the future.
It all made being an English
major seem rather futile, but I stuck it out anyway, if only because I
hoped someday to get paid for teaching Shakespeare. Today I possess a
fairly large obsolete vocabulary: I can tell you what thousands of words
used to mean.
Im resigned to change in
language, but it also has its disturbing side. The more the language alters,
the harder it becomes to understand the past. The English of Chaucer has
long since become a semi-foreign language. The same will soon be true of
Shakespeare, whom we already need footnotes to help us through. And then
Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson, and so on. To all but scholars, the
books of the past become closed books. They generously repay the effort of
study, but that effort may be more than most people can afford or want to
expend.
![[Breaker quote: But will he be missed?]](2004breakers/040511.gif) Even the
U.S. Constitution is written in a language increasingly remote from our
own. What was plain English two centuries ago is a good deal less plain to
us. The language of The Federalist Papers, which explain the
Constitution, is even less accessible. Will we soon have to read the
Constitution in translation?
For me, this is the tragic side of
linguistic change: It keeps cutting us off from communication with our
own ancestors, sealing us off from any wisdom they have to offer us. A
reader of the classics no longer feels like a participant in a great
conversation cutting across time; he feels like a lonely, even slightly
eccentric, specialist.
The great writers of the past
knew their own past. The way Shakespeare and Milton write shows their
awareness of the French and Latin roots of English in their own times;
ancient resonances and continuities give both music and meaning to their
words. That remained true, to some extent, of most educated writers
through the nineteenth century. The English language, then as always, was
changing, but they used it with a sense of responsibility to the past. Even
when new words were coined, they were often based on Latin and Greek
roots to give them anchorage and to avoid sheer novelty. Change was kept
gradual and to some degree rational.
Today, more and more, new
words just pop up without that sort of connection to the past. Consider
the word racism. The philosopher David Stove observed that it
never appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary before 1971;
today its everywhere. You wonder, Stove remarked,
how journalists could possibly have managed without this word
until recently.
Since racism looms so
large in todays vocabulary, you also wonder how writers as
eloquent as Shakespeare, Milton, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot managed to
get through their entire lifetimes without using, even once, the word
Jesse Jackson uses every five minutes. Possibly they were verbally
impoverished, and Jackson has added nuance to human expression; or
possibly the word itself is evidence of impoverishment. It suggests a
language molded less by Shakespeare than by Stalin, better suited to
expressing crude political attitudes than niceties of meaning.
George Orwell saw not only the
poverty but the danger of a language that had become purely contemporary.
A language without roots, without the authority of generations implicit in
its usages, is the perfect instrument for tyranny.
Joseph Sobran
|