George Eliot
Lately my daughter and I have been watching a lot of period pieces depicting the world of Victorian novels. Soon we will watch the third of six episodes of George Eliot's Middlemarch. What strikes me about these works is the range of language available to the writers and their reading audiences. The English language of the 19th C was a very precise tool that could describe extremely complex ideas with very few words, and a range of emotions and feelings with words long gone from our 21st C collective vocabulary.
I notice it in students' essays. Particularly if they are required to describe the quality of something, they have at their disposal adjectives that really mean either good or bad. 'Awesome' means good, and 'awful' means bad. 'Fantastic' means good, and 'terrible' means bad. 'Incredible', 'unbelievable', and 'sick' all mean good, and 'lame', 'mean' and 'gay' mean bad. It is as if we have taken litmus paper to our rich and complex arsenal of adjectives and decided to render them either acids or bases.
Before Christmas last year, Kira prepared for her SAT's by writing previous SAT exams. She made a list of words that she did not understand, and together we sat down and studied them. She learned words like 'capricious', 'coquettish', 'dilletante', 'ineffable', 'bombastic', 'disingenuous'. We spent the next few days trying to enter these words into our everyday conversations, and it was a lot of fun. However, the fact that she soon will be an adult, and had never learned these words is meaningful.
In contrast, during Shakespeare's time, the Rose and the Globe theatres were filled with representatives of the entire class system, and Shakespeare's language, filled with nuance and humour and cleverness, was understood and enjoyed right across the social spectrum.
What is it in our society that has allowed the standard of our language to degrade so precipitously from even, say, the 1920's? What is going on? It is as if we have all drunk from a well poisoned with something that has made us stupid. How can two words - awesome and awful - have been twisted to mean 'good' and 'bad' respectively? How can the word 'gay' go from meaning something really quite wonderful to meaning 'bad'? Why is it that athletes, role models for so many, cannot get more out of their language than 'Obviously, it was incredibly unbelievable!' These athletes experience stimulation on an order and in a quantity beyond what most human beings will ever experience in a lifetime, and yet they are completely unable to express their viewpoints beyond 'It was good'. Were their language skills even remotely close to their athletic skills, we as an audience might live for a moment in the world of people so naturally gifted. We might get to see what it was really like scoring that goal, beyond the fact that 'it was good'.
We are letting down our ancestors who constructed and then bequeathed to us a wonderfully flexible and powerful language. Can anyone tell me what has happened? Because what has happened is bad, not good.
1 comment:
Excellent article Jim.
Perhaps 'the well we've all drunk from' that makes us stupid is the ever-present, insidious and addictive media we are all so willing to partake of, ( sorry I ended with a preposition) gedgambein which so much of the dialogue is directed toward the vocabulary of a 12 year old audience.
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