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| Whitakers Almanack, 1893 |
Maybe it's my reawakened
interest in old books that leads me to wonder about our evolving
language. I've been reading lately in a textbook titled Essays &
Essay-Writing, an anthology of
personal essays selected from The Atlantic Monthly
and authorized for use in English classes at the Grade 12 level. It
was published in 1933 and my copy comes complete with names scrawled
in the frontispiece and flyleaves and the scribbled notes tell me
that this copy was read (or, at least, possessed) by a series of
senior students at B.L.C.H.S, which may be Blaine Lake Central (?)
High School.
An
essay called “The Flavor of Things” by Robert M. Gay chronicling
the author's defective relationship to mathematics contains the
following sentence about people who love that particular discipline:
Permutations and combinations and the doctrine of chances filled
their souls with elation; they would rather wander over the area of a
parallelogram than over the greenest meadow under heaven, collecting
angles and sides as another would daisies and buttercups, and chasing
the unknown quantity as another might a butterfly (p. 17).
One can hardly read this today without visions of quills and
inkwells, oak desks and tweed-jackets-with-elbow-patches springing to
mind. The written word has changed a great deal since 1933, not only
in the abandonment of antiquated diction (word choice) but in the
aversion to long sentences, elaborate metaphors and the eschewing of
contractions, slang and colloquialisms.
A present-day version of Gay's sentence might well read, “Some
guys really dig math.”
I worry some days about the consequences of abandoning sensory
writing and enlarged vocabulary, about the increasing inability to
deal with complex sentence structures. I may be considered a language
Luddite for such apprehensions, reinforced, possibly, by the style in
which I've chosen to write this essay. Indeed, I've been
accused in the past of writing in an archaic style that makes
comprehension difficult. (Someone said to me about my book, What I
Meant to Say Was . . . that they enjoyed what I'd written, even
though they didn't understand much of it!)
Go back to my first paragraph for a moment. If I had asked you to
point to the frontispiece or flyleaf in a book, would you have been
able to do it with confidence? These terms are book jargon, of
course, and you don't have to know what they mean to be a connoisseur
of literature, but I've long been of the opinion that a larger
vocabulary is better than a smaller one, especially if being able to
understand what's going on in the world and/or participating in
significant dialogue matters to you. Likewise, if you want to read
past page 5 in Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow's The Grand
Design with some understanding, a broad—as opposed to a
narrow—vocabulary is almost mandatory.
I don't know how the students of the Thirties fared with Essays
and Essay-Writing, although I have noticed that some of the
easier essays—language-wise—were more marked up than the more
complex ones, a pretty good indication that the teachers using the
text deferred to the apparent comprehension levels of their classes.
In these days of the diminishing use of books for learning about the
world, the questions, “what are we losing?" and "what have we lost?”
seem relevant to me. Are you a bibliophile like me? Do you
know what a bibliophile is? Do you share my concerns about
language evolution?
If so, let me hear from you and we can start a Language
Complainers' Club! Be a nice change from complaining about the
Harper Conservatives.
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