Love that Orwell

[garote]

In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink.

I started reading this from the bottom up, because I was most interested in the short list of rules that Orwell presents at the end. I've been really into critiques lately - of movies, of scientific studies, of Miss America contestants - and now here's one of language-mangling writers and speakers from Orwell's time. The advice is excellent of course, but I also find it amusing that some of the "vast dump of flyblown metaphors" he derides have passed out of style and could actually be resurrected. "Ride roughshod" for example, or "fishing in troubled waters". ... Well, on second thought, ...

He also makes several points that I agree with but am also certain would drive my high-school teachers crazy:

"The defense of English language [...] has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. ... It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear."

He's also particularly irritated by the use of foreign phrases to give "an air of culture and elegance". The question I have now is: How is this all going to work when half the population of my home state speaks Spanish? Are we really just going to keep jamming Spanish and English together until they become Spanglish, and go from there?

Comments

[conflictdswitch.livejournal.com]

How is this all going to work when half the population of my home state speaks Spanish? Are we really just going to keep jamming Spanish and English together until they become Spanglish, and go from there?

I think language is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a very real anti-foreign attitude developing in the US. I expect to see legislation leading to the adoption of a national language (and it might even be English) in the near future. When that stuff starts going down, I will seriously consider moving to Canada. 8)

[graue.livejournal.com]

Oh come on. Politics isn't that bad here. The anti-foreign thing will go out of fashion, and you'll feel dumb for subjecting yourself to shitty weather over nothing.

[garote]

Well, from a practical viewpoint, living amongst people who speak the same language is more important than living where the weather is good. And what gives you such confidence that "the anti-foreign thing" will go "out of fashion" with any expediency? In the US, the "anti-foreign thing" is more like a venereal disease that keeps dropping out of remission.

All cultural barriers in the world are preserved primarily by language barriers -- and if you've got a lot of people emigrating for the sake of money, with a mindset that their culture and language must be preserved at the same time, you're going to have a mess wherever they settle. The more the US government decides to combat this cultural influx with policy and force or arms, the more of a mess we'll have - because it'll be establishing a legal precedent for what is essentially the Ku Klux Klan Part II.

Why live around all that strife, when you don't have to? When you don't have to pay taxes to a government that encourages it?

[graue.livejournal.com]

There are only so many countries in the world, I'm not going to tell off a perfectly good one just because it has a few little issues (which are certainly not going to fix themselves if I leave). Why are you staying?

[shutupassbutt.livejournal.com]

I laughed because I knew what that link was to before I clicked it.

[ex-zeugma416.livejournal.com]

This is truly a classic essay, always worth a look-over once in a while.

The objection to Latin- and Greek-derived synonyms is understandable but he misses his real target. The reason you see so much of that kind of thing in bureaucratic "business" writing is that usually the idea is very simple, often brutally so, but because of the social situation it needs to be "dressed up" a little bit so that it sounds objective and important and -- most importantly -- hard to argue with. Never "you might be fired," rather something like "in view of the department's recent budget review, the department will expedite the general review of each team member's performance numbers in order to determine the areas best suited for right-sizing..." etc. Yeah, it's a load of crap, but any idiot gets the message in about two seconds, especially if the idiot in question hasn't been doing too well with his sales. In brief, I think Orwell's instincts are good, but what he is really objecting to here are the social situations that create writing like that. Someone is always being dishonest or softening the impact of a rough blow. But he's attacking a symptom here.

The other objection, to "foreign phrases" as he calls them, is completely misguided and is in the same vein as the above. With one exception, every one of those phrases is now an accepted part of the English language. More to the point, can you imagine anybody saying "status quo" or "cul de sac" in an effort to sound cultured? As if! I can imagine those phrases in the mouth of a truck driver and it seems perfectly natural. They even named a video game after "deus ex machina." Foreign phrases, used enough, become native phrases. Again, it's the attitude of the writer he's objecting to, in this case pretentiousness.

In both cases Orwell is making a moral judgment, dressed up as recommended editorial policy.

Now go puff on THAT pipe for a while. :)

[garote]

Good point about the foreign phrases. I can think of some that have come into fashion recently - jihad, anime, ramen - now they're just part of the common language. And maybe Orwell's not just attacking pretentiousness ... maybe he's also ragging on writers who are "out of touch" with what is and isn't commonly known. Like, nowadays, someone could toss out "deus ex machina" and wouldn't have to follow it with a footnote ... but if the same writer invoked "fin de seicle", it would need some explanation - since it (oddly enough) has not seen exposure lately.

I sometimes wonder how many teenage kids have played "deus ex" and completely confused their parents when casually mentioning it at the dinner table... "You played what?" "Deus ex!" "Don't you mean deus ex machina?" "What's a machina?" "What?" "I don't know!" "Third base!" etc.

[garote]

Er, that's, "fin de siècle" :D

[ex-zeugma416.livejournal.com]

And about the Spanish/Spanglish/English continuum, I think that bemoaning the incursion of Spanish into English is probably a waste of time; moreover, I think it ought to be welcomed as the clearest possible sign of overall mutual comfort between the two groups. For instance, you don't find anywhere near the level of Arabic that you would expect in modern French, despite much more than a century of Arab presence in the country -- intensified sharply since 1960 -- and that can portend only bad things. You remember the riots the other year -- there is massive alienation from French culture. But that's another story...

[garote]

I think the reason the Spanish vs. English question is so interesting to me is that I have an ingrained sense of the cohesiveness of English, and of Spanish, and can't see their mixing as anything but a mess.

But another part of me knows quite well that the cohesiveness of the two languages is an illusion. ... Especially with English.

Even so, I don't know how the two languages are ever going to become comfortable enough with each other that conducting detailed business or producing works of art won't be a matter of choosing one and ignoring the other - or producing two separate (and thus arguably unequal) versions of everything. I can see English absorbing a whole pile of Spanish nouns, sure, but what about the grammar and syntax? Will adjectives casually migrate around to the other side of nouns? ¿Will punctuation change? Will the commonly spoken tongue become a mash of sentences and fragments from both languages? Or will we only keep the grammar that the languages have in common?

See, to me, it's either we merge languages (or half of us migrate to one) - or we become two separate nations, perhaps even two separate classes. I really think it's that important. And call me an uncouth American, but I'd rather not see the US fumble the whole "melting pot" phenomenon and turn into France - or Europe in general. I'm working on my Spanish because I find it very disturbing that I can't have a conversation with half my neighbors, or the people who clean my office building... But I'm worried still that somehow bilingualism isn't the answer...