My daughter recently had to prepare a book report, which consisted of two parts: an oral report and one the students were supposed to "write." Hoping to help her develop a theme and practice editing skills, I suggested she use the computer. I actually helped her type part of what she wanted to say.
The next day, she told me that her teacher had accepted her work, but that she had not written it, because it was done on the computer (Why he didn't want work typed was never explained). Rather, he maintained she had "composed" the work. He cited a dictionary definition of write as the process of inscribing characters on a fixed medium. Unfortunately, this denotation omits the other nineteen meanings of the word in the dictionary I looked in. I wrote a detailed response to the teacher and pointed out that it would be pretty silly to say that I do not write legal agreements or my brother does not write books because we do our work primarily on a computer. I told him that composing was the process of creation, just as it is for my wife when she composes music. Writing is the process of putting that composition into a fixed medium.
The teacher emailed me, conceding the point, but complaining that the modern usage of some words has become so broad that, because they mean everything, they mean nothing. I suppose he didn't think he should have to specify handwrite to the students. I disagree with the example used to prove the rule--the word write clearly can include typing electronically, and this is probably the most common usage of the word now--but I agree in principle.
Most people who care about such things agree that the average vocabulary of Americans has gradually shrunk over the past decades. Television and movies cater to the mass market, so they of necessity use a limited word set. Furthermore, people read fewer books than fifty years ago. As a result, the "classics" in English like Shakespeare and Milton are becoming ever less accessible to the general reader. Some of this is undoubtedly due to the change is what vocabulary is necessary to function in society, i.e., a shift in what words we know, rather than how many. Not many people need to know what a halyard or a epaulette is in this day and age, but you're probably familiar with the terms "flash drive" and "microprocessor," which obviously didn't exist in 17th-century England. Still, I do believe that there has been a general deterioration in vocabulary, syntax, and grammar over the past decades. The deterioration of grammar in particular has accelerated with the advent of email, and even more so with instant messaging and text messaging.
I love finding just the right word for what I'm feeling, but a word is no use if your intended audience doesn't know what it means. For instance, many people confuse the terms hoi polloi and hoity toity, which makes using either term in conversation problematic. If I say I'm just part of the hoi polloi and you think I'm stuck up, my word choice doesn't help either of us. And no politician better attempt to use the word niggardly, even if they know that the etymology is not related to that other "n" word. To quote:
"It was while giving a speech in Washington, to a very international audience, about the British theft of the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon. I described the attitude of the current British authorities as 'niggardly.' Nobody said anything, but I privately resolved—having felt the word hanging in the air a bit—to say 'parsimonious' from then on." [Christopher Hitchens, "The Pernicious Effects of Banning Words," Slate.com, Dec. 4, 2006]
I worry that we'll all eventually end up in a world where all comparatives and superlatives are reduced to "very," "VERY," or "[expletive]," and the language has morphed so much that people will need to read the King James Bible or King Lear in dual-column translation to understand it any more than they understand Beowulf (Old English) without translation today.
So, there's my rant. Yes, I write contracts for a living. I think about subtle differences in the meaning of words and consider how a judge would interpret them. With such a rich language, why be niggardly with your usage of it?
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2 comments:
Language changes over time, but just as we need notes to read Shakespeare, so was Chaucer difficult for Elizabethans to understand.
I suspect that one culprit is universal education. Many people who would have once belonged to the great ranks of unwashed mashes now wish to participate in the common discourse and that means dumbing down the vocabulary. There is certainly rhetoric of a more traditional and erudite nature still available, but it's no longer the default.
On the other hand, mass media and universal education have reduced language shift. Between 1100 and 1700, the language of one century was literally a different dialect than that spoken just a hundred years earlier. Imagine speaking to your grandparents and having a greater difference between their speech and yours than you would find between a Brooklyn accent and a Cockney.
Similarly, while I think it is sad that people no longer recognize many classical or biblical references, it isn't true that we don't still have cultural touchstones. These are generally mass media references from the 1930s on, the relative merit of which is a different subject altogether.
As for the language of the King James bible, this was archaic by the time the book went to the printers for the first time.
For instance, many people confuse the terms hoi polloi and hoity toity, which makes using either term in conversation problematic.
This is funny on many levels. :)
No question that the standardization that occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries as the printing press became ubiquitous dramatically slowed the change of the English language. Also, I know that language creep is inevitable, but I wish I didn't often feel obliged to artificially constrain my vocabulary. It's the reduction in the size of the average vocabulary that is most lamentable.
I have Strong's concordance of the Bible and sometimes use other translations for comparison, but I do prefer the way KJV sounds most of the time. Some of the newer translations also dumb down the language in the same way I've been lamenting and strip some of the meaning from the text. I once saw a "translation" that sounded more like beatnik poetry. It had a footnote that referred to the Last Supper as "Jesus weekly mealtime rap with his followers."
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