THE OTHER DAY A headline caught my attention in the financial pages of the International Herald Tribune. I normally don’t look at the business section or the sports and avoid anything about astronauts. But that day—November 13—turning the pages I saw CHILEAN JUNTA WINS PRIVATE FINANCIAL AID. Then in smaller type: “‘Work spirit’ Praised by American Banker.” The news story related that private U.S. bank loans had suddenly become available for Chile—a dramatic turnabout following on the overthrow of the Allende government. The previous Friday, Manufacturers Hanover Trust had announced that it was extending a $24-million loan to a Chilean bank. According to unnamed banking sources, described as reliable, Manufacturers Hanover had lent an additional $20 million to the central bank of Santiago. In any case, the $24 million was the largest credit given to Chile by a U.S. bank since Salvador Allende took office three years ago. Altogether, eight to ten U.S. banks and two Canadian banks have offered Chile commercial loans amounting to about $150 million in the two months since Allende was overthrown.
You may wonder what all this has to do with language; the connection with politics is fairly clear. Well, toward the bottom of the page the writer quoted a vice-president of Manufacturers Hanover, James R. Greene, who on making the announcement spoke at length—I quote—“about the renewal of U.S. business faith in Chile.” This is Greene talking: “The work spirit that I have seen in Chile leads me to fully trust that the international press will correct the negative image that is being spread about this country abroad.” You will note one split infinitive, two superfluous “that”s, and two cliché phrases, “work spirit” and “negative image,” that also seem to be circumlocutions. Aside from the question of whether an image can be spread, like butter or like a disease or like a rumor, one asks what the speaker can be alluding to by the blanket word “negative.” It is indeed a blanket covering the summary executions of thousands of oppositionists, the countless illegal arrests, the setting-up of camps, the abolition of Parliament, the suppression of left-wing political parties, the suspension of all other political parties, press censorship, purges of the universities, factories, and state enterprises. This is what the colorless “negative image” translates into, and the selection of the word “image”—in its current PR definition, not yet, I see, admitted to my dictionary, copyright 1957—assigns a kind of deniability to all those public facts, as though they were bodiless, insubstantial, mere refractions of evanescent appearance, as opposed to reality.
By contrast to his handling of the negative, Greene eventually defines what he understands by the “work spirit.” Something positive. Here he is again: “The fact that Chileans are working on Saturday is a very good antecedent, as far as my bank is concerned. This is very important in the financial world.” So work spirit means that the forty-hour week has been abolished by the junta. He does not say, at least in the Herald Tribune quotes from him, that the junta has promised to return to private capital the “vast majority” of the more than three hundred foreign and domestic enterprises that were nationalized by the Allende government without compensation. Nor that it has announced that it is prepared to renew negotiations on compensation to the three U.S. companies whose copper mines were taken over—assets worth between $500 and $700 million. That, the joyful undersong of the announcement he had to make, possibly did not need to be put into words. It was tacit. But what about the word “antecedent”? Working on Saturday is a very good antecedent, he says, as far as his bank is concerned. I have been asking myself what word he was reaching for. “Precedent”? But “precedent,” though slightly closer to the mark, does not make sense either. Precedent for what, unless he means working on Sunday? The thing he is trying to articulate, evidently, is that his bank takes the extension of the work week as a good sign. Then why not say so? Maybe, to his ear, sign was too commonplace a word for a $24-million occasion. Or maybe, grope as he would, he couldn’t remember “sign.” Not for the life of him. Was he speaking off the cuff or reading a prepared statement? The news story does not tell.
To get back, though, for a moment to Manufacturers Hanover—no prior knowledge of the circumstances, of Allende’s murder, U.S. investments, the blood bath, would be required by a newspaper reader of Greene’s quoted remarks in order to understand that something was rotten in Chile. His language inadvertently made that clear. In South Vietnam (when I was there in 1967), I noticed the same kind of thing. If I had dropped straight from Mars, I thought, into one of the daily press briefings, I would have known from the periphrastic, circumspect way our spokesmen expressed themselves that an indefensible action of some sort was going on in that country. As with Greene, just about everything they said, or, rather, “stated,” was in a kind of bumbling code that quickly translated itself into plain English: e.g., for “success,” read “failure.” The purpose of language, somebody—probably French—said, is to conceal thought. I don’t agree with the aphorism, yet the American language, as spoken today, often bears it out with comical results: the attempt to conceal an underlying thought or feeling produces almost total transparence. As when Nixon, in his letter to Senator Sam Ervin last summer about why he was not going to hand over the tapes to the Committee, said they might be subject to misinterpretation by persons “with other views”; he might as well have made an announcement that he had decided they were extremely damaging. That letter was the first confirmation of John Dean’s testimony to come from what we could call a reliable independent source.
Of course there are people who have become so practiced in evasion, euphemism, circumlocution, and all the forms of lying that they would not know how to tell the truth if an occasion favoring truth-telling should arise. Their syntax, so twisted, crippled, and deformed by these habits, is incapable of directness, and the occasional forthright statement—“I love America,” “I am not a crook”—though grammatically sound as a bell, has to be construed as meaning the opposite: “I hate America,” “I am a crook.”
But this is pathology, and though many or even perhaps most public officials and corporation heads are afflicted by it, I don’t think it extends yet to the population at large. In the population at large, though, you find warning symptoms of a deteriorated faculty of expression: the inarticulateness of the very young and the long-winded prosiness of the middle-aged and old. On the one hand, “I went, like, to a party”; on the other, “Thursday evening I attended a function.” The common speech of the people, on which Wordsworth hoped to base a new ars poetica, is riddled with such curious faults. Between the two examples I have just quoted there is only a generational gap; both seek to avoid direct statement. The continual “like ... like”—“I went, like, to a party and we smoked, like, pot”—is the sidewise, slithering, crab-gaited, youth approach, whereas the elderly widow who “attended a function” is putting her own strange distance from “Thursday I went to a party.”
Enough has been said—and for years—about “funeral director,” “passed away,” “senior citizen,” “home” for “house,” “wealthy” for “rich.” Such linguistic vulgarities, contrary to what is thought, are not restricted to emotive fields, like death and old age, where fear is being held at a distance, or, like the home and money, where reverence is duly paid. “I got my car fixed”—not really a sentimental matter—now turns into “I took my car to be repaired.” In rural areas, women talk of their “hose,” and “what a lovely gown”; in cities there is “panty hose.” Pedantic neologisms issuing from psychiatry are fuzzing up the atmosphere: “He is highly motivated.” No matter how many times I hear that, I can never understand what it means. “He has high motives”? No. “He has a lot of drive”? Closer. Maybe “He likes the work he is doing.” And “relate”—which is youth jargon: “I found I couldn’t relate to Physics 1B.” “He is an achiever” (or “an under-achiever”) at least is clear. It means he does well (or badly) in school, including sports and “activities.”
Take the still new adverb “hopefully.” People who care for language, including myself, wince every time they hear it. It floats around in the sentence, attached to nothing in particular. “Hopefully the dollar will go up.” There it certainly does not modify the verb, as a good adverb should unless there is an adjective somewhere to cling to. If it modified the verb, it would be “the dollar will go hopefully up.” Yet it is not a grammatical howler, so far as I can see; it is a parenthesis thrown in, on the pattern of “incidentally,” which is not a desirable form either, but, being useful, has got itself accepted. (I myself prefer “by the way” or simple parenthesis marks, as in this sentence.) It must have come to us from German “hoffentlich,” normally translated as “it is to be hoped”; perhaps we are indebted to German businessmen, who introduced it along with Volkswagens and Mercedes. What is melancholy about the suddenly universal “hopefully” is that it seems to point to a contrary state of mind, that is, to an absence of hope. The speaker really fears the dollar will go down still further, and if you tell me “Hopefully we’ll meet in a better world,” I can pretty well understand that we won’t. Its free-floating position in the sentence emphasizes that insecurity, that lack of ground for hope. It is an irony that this pathetic invading adverb should be sweeping the country at what may be the lowest point in our history.
Our language, once homely and colloquial, seeks to aggrandize our meanest activities with polysyllabic terms or it retreats from frankness into a stammering verbosity. Americans are slow tedious talkers, and universal semi-education has made them worse. Only the poorer blacks and a few rural whites are still able to express themselves vividly and to find the word they want without too protracted a search. Maybe this is because they never finished school. Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do. In fact, it is almost a comfort and I could wish the poor might stay untaught forever, for their own sakes and for the preservation of the language, if the price did not include other kinds of deprivation. Poor blacks, some rural whites and a few gifted talkers are the only people I have heard in recent times use the language with relish. They are the only ones to enjoy talking artistically, for its own sake. Senator Sam Ervin’s popularity on radio and television was based, I think, in large part, on his unabashed relish for the language; being old and rural, he sounded like a poor man. His relish for the language, sometimes positively syllabic (“eleemosynary,” you could hear his tongue taste those vowels), seemed to be deeply related to his determination to get the truth of Watergate out and to his confidence that this could be done—slowly and painfully, like a tooth-extraction before the days of Novocain.
Senator Ervin was not always grammatical, but that enhanced the pleasure one had in him, because his grammar did not so much err as revert to older modes (“ain’t,” “it don’t”) and showed no disrespect for the forms of speech, that is, for the sinews of thought. By contrast, there was Jeb Stuart Magruder, a graduate of Williams College. Since I don’t have on hand a transcript of his testimony, I will construct a characteristic but imaginary sentence: “Mr. Haldeman indicated to me that between he and I we had a problem.” And here is a real exchange between him and Senator Ervin. They were talking about the “climate” prevailing in the White House. Ervin: “... I just could not understand why people got so fearful.” Magruder: “I would characterize that at least my reaction was stronger after three years of working here than it had been before.” More genuine Magruder: “We agreed, Mr. Liddy and I, that he would terminate from the committee all activities.” “In November of 1971 it was indicated to me that the project was not going to get off the ground and subsequently G. Gordon Liddy came into the picture after that.” Finally, “I think from my own personal standpoint, I did lose some respect for the legal process because I did not see it working as I hoped it would when I came here.”
I put the verb “indicate” in my imaginary sentence because it came up over and over in Magruder’s testimony. The choice of the word raised interesting questions. When he said “he indicated to me” did he mean simply “he told me”? Let us look at a few examples. “John Dean indicated to me that I would not be indicted.” “We indicated to Mr. Stans the problem we had with money.” [Haldeman] “indicated that I should get back to Washington directly.” “As I recall, we all indicated that we should remove any documents that could be damaging, whether they related at all to the Watergate or not.” Of Hugh Sloan and his perjured testimony to the grand jury: “So I indicated at the meeting that I thought he had a problem and might have to do something about it. He said, you mean commit perjury? I said you might have to do something like that to solve your problem and very honestly was doing that in good faith to Mr. Sloan to assist him at that time.”
The last extract tells the story. “Indicate” means something less and more than “told.” Sloan’s “you mean commit perjury?” points to the terrible difference between the two. Sloan, an honest accountant (as his conduct before the Ervin committee had already made clear), who insisted on having things named by their names, and the devious operator Magruder, still posing to the Committee as a bashful penitent freshman. Even when pressed by Sloan, he will not assent to “perjury” as the right name for what he has in mind. “... something like that,” he says. So must we conclude that “indicate” in that crowd meant “tip off”? Possibly, but it is hard to see how, in some of the circumstances, this was done. When John Dean let Magruder know that he was not going to be indicted, what form of words did he use? Or did he wigwag the message? And when Haldeman indicated to him, by long-distance telephone, that he should get back to Washington right away, how did he put it, so that Magruder would understand the order without being told it was one? Did he say “The weather is beautiful in Washington at this time of year, Jeb. The forecast for tomorrow is sunny and mild”? From Magruder’s parlance alone, you would get the feeling of secretive men conscious of bugging devices everywhere. It was not surprising to learn that Liddy in California, the morning after the break-in, warned Magruder to find a safe phone. Nor, finally, that Nixon was tapping himself. And if all essential communications were coded, in this involute fashion, “indicated,” never stated (“indicateur,” in French, is the common slang word for “informer,” “police spy”), no wonder there has been so much contradiction in the Watergate testimony as to who said what; they were all bent on not saying anything to each other that could be pinned down to a concrete meaning. Imprecision was the rule, and the cover-up did not begin June 18 but had been practiced on a daily basis in the ordinary transmission of messages. Indeed, what we call talk for them consisted almost exclusively of messages. This was true no doubt even of banter.
John Mitchell had his own code, personalized, initialed JNM, like a monogram on a City Hall mobster’s shirt sleeve. It was less bureaucratic than Magruder’s, not so stamped by office routines. The expression “White House horror stories,” for instance, was to be understood as an allusion to Charles Colson. Another favorite phrase, “in hindsight,” mystified me. It cannot be code, but it is not English. What he means is “looking back,” or, more starchy, “in the light of my present knowledge.” You cannot say “in hindsight,” any more than you can say “in foresight.” For fun, I looked the noun up in the big Oxford English Dictionary. The original sense was the backsight of a rifle, and the word was first used by Mayne Reid in 1851 in a work called Scalp Hunting: “When you squint through her hindsights.” The second reference for the word, still in the primary sense, is Farmer’s Americanisms, 1889. The mystery is cleared up. You can see John Mitchell squinting through the backsight of his rifle at the Watergate affair, putting a bead on that wild Indian, Colson, on Jeb Magruder. That peculiar expression (not used by any other witness) is his enigmatic signature, hence, after all, a kind of code. Will it find its way into the OED?
Of course if he liked that word so much, if the picture gave him such dour satisfaction, he could have said “through hindsight.” His lazy mind did not think it out. In lighting on the wrong preposition, he was a typical American of today. The breakdown of our language, evident in the misuse, i.e., the misunderstanding of nouns and adjectives, is most grave, though perhaps not so conspicuous, in the handling of prepositions, those modest little connectives that hold the parts of a phrase or a sentence together. They are the joints of any language, what make it, literally, articulate. As you know from experience in learning a foreign language, they are the hardest part to get right. You may have a pretty good vocabulary and have mastered the verb forms, the subjunctive, even genders, but you are still horribly uncertain about “de” and “à,” “en” and “dans,” “zu” and “nach,” “aus” and “auf.” Whether to say “Je pense de vous,” or “Je pense à vous” (sometimes an almost imperceptible difference), “zu Hause,” “nach Hause,” “zu Bett,” “im Bett”? They cannot be learned by mastering general rules; memorizing sentences containing them may be helpful but is no sure guide to a new sentence; the application of logic is useless, for their peculiarity is to defy logic, to be capricious. If you are like me, you will never really get hold of them in all their aberrant motion; even if you have spoken the language for fifteen years, doubt remains.
This means that they are the quintessential feature of a language; unlike nouns, verbs, and adjectives, they cannot be exchanged against their opposite numbers in a second or third language. In short, they are stubbornly idiomatic, from idios (“one’s own, private, peculiar”). Though I said, just now, that logic is useless to a foreigner who is seeking to master them, they do express the inner logic of a particular language—a logic that is, precisely, different from the alien logic one is uselessly trying to apply. They are a birthright.
It is obvious that America, with its doors so long open to new citizens, would have a hard time maintaining the purity of those little particles of speech. Yet in fact our prepositions held out quite valiantly throughout the nineteenth century and through the first decades of the twentieth. I would date the deterioration from the forties; at least I first became aware of it in 1945–46 when I went to teach in a college and discovered from my students’ papers that many of those young people did not have any idea what preposition was called for in a given circumstance. “Tolstoy in his progenitors and his disciples,” one student wrote. To change “progenitors” to “predecessors” and “disciples” to “followers” only took a little practice in mind-reading—yes, the student agreed happily, that was what he had been trying to say, he guessed. But that “in”! Impossible to penetrate the thought process that had been working there. Some relation between Tolstoy and those who preceded him as well as those who followed him was adumbrated but remained inexpressible.
That prepositions point out relationships between members of a sentence is plain. In classical languages much of this work was done by declension of the noun. I have always liked the notion I came upon long ago in a Greek grammar that the declension was a visual thing for the Greeks. The noun was pictured as standing straight up (nominative), lying on its side (ablative), leaning (dative); I forget what the genitive position was. This innocent clarity of vision, an exercise of both the imaginative and the analytical faculties, has much to do with the beauty of Greek literature and also, I would guess, with the perspicuousness of Greek philosophy and Greek political thought. One thinks of Socrates: the fanciful stories and myths he invented, to lay bare, finally, a relation or sequence admitted by the hearer to be ineluctable. Also his idea that knowledge is an act of recovery from the storehouse of the mind; teaching was merely prompting the pupil to recognize something he had known all along, though he had not known he knew it, till Socrates showed him. The slave boy in the Meno. A thought, when fully grasped, should induce a feeling of recognition. This implies, of course, that our common universe, on close examination, makes sense, that there are connections, if only in the brain.
One reason for the loss of clarity in our current speaking and writing must be the fact that the classical languages are no longer taught in schools. In fact, the loss of control over prepositions—the articulate parts of speech—seems to have coincided with the disappearance of Latin as a “subject” in public high schools. Up through the war, at least in New England, in the mill towns (not just in Boston), Latin was still taught—Greek sometimes too—by vigorous unmarried old ladies. When they died or retired, it went. In New England, in former days, the teaching of Latin was considered indispensable to a truly civic education; it was thought to form democratic habits of mind. Whether it did or not, the dropping of it from the program of free universal education certainly deepened the chasm between classes. And whatever it did or did not do toward conserving democratic habits, Latin surely promoted clear, analytic thinking and helped us in our language to distinguish the relations between members of a sentence.
Some of this training in logic and economy has been delegated to mathematics. In the college I speak of, where I taught literature back in the mid-forties, many of my best students were math and physics majors. They had no particular gift for literature, but they knew how to follow a sequence of thought, and if I had asked it of them, they could probably have taken a sentence apart and put it back together. It was usually a relief to read their papers. Unfortunately, today’s readers and writers cannot all be math and physics majors.
The disappearance of classics is obviously not the only factor in the atrophying of the power to communicate. On the grade-school level, there used to be parsing and diagramming of sentences. I wonder whether that still exists, and very much doubt it. In my schools, we had to do it every day. Some who were bored by parsing did not mind diagramming. We also had to memorize poetry, but that too has gone, I suppose.
Yet if Latin is no longer given and English is not taught as rigorously as it once was, that is not enough to account for the dimensions of what has happened. The public was startled and shocked by the language-murder committed before television cameras during the Watergate hearings by White House and Cabinet functionaries with college degrees. It is true that the mixture of euphemism, circumlocution, and a kind of insolent barbarity of phrasing gave an insight into a new mentality that could take an ordinary citizen aback. But the grammar, the clichés? Where had the public been during the last few decades—in a cloister?—that it could have been troubled by “at that point in time”? It cannot have been paying attention to its own speech or its neighbor’s. Most people sound like Jeb Magruder. Ninety percent of the letters I get from Americans—strangers, I mean—are at best half-literate. And these are from citizens who read books (that is why they are writing to me), from sub-editors working on magazines and in publisher’s offices, from college professors who have drafted questionnaires, from agents who want to sign me up for lecture tours, who have an idea for a movie. If this sample of the population is a culture-conscious minority, what must the majority write like?
I have plenty of evidence that it was not always so. I have read logs kept by ship’s captains describing the sea, the weather, the ports and islands visited. These old skippers were not Melvilles, but they could write clear and plain. Nor can I conclude that most of them had had advantages, a superior education. Maybe they had not even had parsing in their village schools. I have gone through a mass of papers found in a barrel in a Massachusetts house. The family were storekeepers, and many of the papers are commercial: inventories, records of the dollar they “gave” for a pig, what five bolts of calico cost this winter, what they paid the servant. But they also kept letters. A member of the family would go to New York on the steamboat and report back on the harbor, the streets, the dwellings, the inhabitants, the strangers he met in the boarding-house, the sermons he heard preached. In good sober English, neat legible handwriting, and with a certain power of description, especially where the sermons were concerned. I have read my great-great-uncle’s journal, which he started when he was a student at Dartmouth College before the Civil War and continued into his old age, out in the Middle West, where he went into the real-estate business. He was certainly not an interesting man; in his youth he went through a religious period that brought on paroxysms of conventional feelings; he too was a great church-attender and carefully wrote down a description of each preacher—height, estimated weight, complexion, voice—a detailed account of the sermon and his own responses to it. When old, he was interested mainly in figures—the temperature outside, snow measurement, wind velocity, his wife’s weight, which he recorded in the journal once a week. Yet, except for an occasional spelling lapse (he was a college drop-out), the journal is written in very acceptable, if colorless English. No clichés; he was a cliché himself, you could say, but his mild pen gave no offense. Today, one of his descendants cannot write a letter to the telephone company asking for service to be suspended without tying himself into knots so convolute that it would take a Houdini to arrange his escape from the opening clause.
Now it is possible that this breakdown in communication will soon be felt throughout the world. The Americans may only have pioneered it, as they have done with computers, the electrified kitchen, and pollution. If it is an effect of modern civilization which is being noticed first in America, then the causes must be larger than any merely local and parochial phenomena, such as the American character with its tendency to pomposity, the dropping of Latin, the permissive approach to the teaching of English. Indeed, those last may be more effects than causes of a world-wide revolution that will end in the dethronement or abdication of the word.
That of course is the gospel Marshall McLuhan has been preaching, although he speaks of the obsolescence of print rather than of the word itself. But if print is condemned, the word, it seems to me, will not survive long. It would be easier to reinstitute Latin in the schools and have everybody parsing and diagramming than to revert to an archaic age where words were carried by chant and gesture. Whatever can be said in favor of television as a “warm” or “hot” medium, it cannot reproduce the conditions of the Homeric world in your living-room. It cannot act as a preserver and transmitter of meaning. Far more than print, it lacks memory, and memory, of course, was a highly developed faculty in pre-literate civilizations, almost like an extra organ of the body. It still is among primitive peoples. Contemporary man’s memory is not improving now that he looks at TV in the evening instead of reading a book or the newspaper. It is getting worse, and television itself is partly responsible for that. Not just the distraction caused by the intrusion of the commercials but also the flickering of the image, the mechanical failure obliging you to turn the dial, the necessity of concentrating on a small square area—all this makes nearly anything seen on television far more unmemorable than something seen on a movie screen, in a darkened house, surrounded by the silent presences of other movie-goers. And if certain pictures first seen on TV retain their peculiar ghostly black-and-white vividness, that is because usually you have seen them afterwards in the newspaper: Kent State, the shooting of Oswald. Nor will tape-recorders insure permanence; in the public domain we are seeing that demonstrated. Future generations may develop an aural memory, but the very popularity of taping today shows that modern people do not remember what they hear, and feel the need to have it played back. The same, in the visual field, can be said of the camera; few tourists today remember what they see.
The decay of language must be part of a whole syndrome in which formerly healthy human faculties—speech, sight, hearing, taste, locomotion, even touch—have been to some degree vitiated by technological advance. This is more evident with the eye, the ear, the feet, the tongue as an organ of taste, the fingers—who but a professional can feel a stone, a piece of material, or tell leather from plastic? Smell seems to be an exception; this sense may have developed with modern civilization, despite air pollution. In the Middle Ages people were less sensitive to bad smells, I think; nowadays Americans profess to have very delicate nostrils, which are offended, when abroad, by the stench of bad drains, Venetian canals, B.O. And the recent work of Saul Bellow shows the primacy he accords to his nose—what Mr. Sammler has against women, more than the way they talk, is the way they smell.
With speech, though, it is not clear how or why machines should have affected it; we have not yet invented a machine that will do our talking for us. And as for writing, have the typewriter, the ball-point, the felt pen really done more than lame our handwriting? True, thanks to the telephone, ordinary people write less than they did and those who write—or dictate—are mainly located in offices. Hence the householder, obliged to write a letter, copies the language of the business communications he receives or that of the social column of his local paper: “I attended a function,” “I was present at the interment.” Lack of practice in writing probably has as a side-effect an impairment or loss of control of speech.
Yet there must be something beyond that. I would guess that our incompetence with words had to do with consciousness-lowering. A reduced consciousness of what is happening, of sights and sounds and textures, is first of all imposed on us by present-day conditions: driving in a car you see less than when you walk; living in a city, in an air-conditioned apartment, you hear less than your ancestors did—no cock’s crow, bird song, rustling of leaves, roar of waterfall. The chief noises you hear are sirens and the refrigerator. But aside from these deprivations (felt as such if felt at all) there are sights and noises you will not to see or hear, sensations you will not to notice—TV commercials, crowding, ugly bodies, ugly clothes, traffic jams, your neighbor’s rock or his classical music. You simply turn them off, and this soon becomes an automatic matter. Your switch is always in the down position. If you want to change that, you find you have to sign up for consciousness-raising sessions or turn on with drugs.
But language is a consciousness-raiser. The problem there is that the power of using and understanding language, like all power, carries responsibilities with it. You consent to having it or you don’t. And most people today would rather not have it. You can’t exactly blame them. If they agreed to use and understand language clearly, this would only exacerbate all those aches and pains of contemporary civilization by putting them into words. It is true that this can give relief but not on a daily basis. Better the primal scream than intelligible words that lead nowhere. Better delegate language to experts and specialists, i.e., intellectuals.
Language on occasion may be a substitute for action (in mourning, for instance) but in the long run if it is not linked to action it becomes insupportable. “Don’t just keep talking. Do something!” This explains, I think, the current dislike felt for intellectuals by the silent majority which Agnew knew how to play on. They are grudged the power of articulate speech which has been delegated to them in a world that has become unspeakable, where action is required, but none is forthcoming. Of course our intellectuals are some of the worst sinners against language; the fall-out in academic circles is asphyxiating, and some of this must be the result of specialization, the loss of touch with common everyday utterance implied by the delegation of powers. One of the amusing sidelights of Watergate was the discovery that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Krogh, and a few others considered themselves an intellectual elite. Haldeman was proud of his language skills, and Ehrlichman showed an open intellectual contempt for the workhorse politicians of the Senate. If the public came to understand, from their jargon, that these were brains-trusters, this would help explain the absence of grief at their departure.
In any case, it is impossible to believe that the misuse and abuse of English on the part of ninety percent of the population are not to some extent voluntary. The numerous handbooks on correct usage, though they sell, I believe, have about as much “relevant impact” as Emily Post’s or Amy Vanderbilt’s etiquette manuals, which sell too. I think people must read all these books for entertainment.
George Orwell foresaw the dangers for a free society of cant, jargon, and euphemism. He was thinking mainly of official and party hypocrisy, which a courageous writer could unmask while pointing to the right way by his own steadfast plain-spoken example. What he missed, I think—perhaps he came too early—was the element of consent in the public. A general will to confusion. He analyzed the phenomenon of double-think but saw it as something inculcated in the enslaved masses by training and repetition. That is not happening to us—unless you count the indoctrination practiced by advertising—and exposure (Orwell’s remedy) of verbal manipulation and malpractice has no effect. How many times has Nixon been exposed as a liar? And nobody cared, except the exposers. Nixon, for most, is just a fact, and words, his own or anybody else’s, do not affect him. What has brought him down, if he is brought down, is a delightful turn of technology—the tapes.
Unlike Orwell, I do not have a remedy. A few men and women in public life who spoke and wrote clearly might help, since people are imitative or, as the current phrase goes, need “role models.” But I think any real improvement would have to be effected by the popular will.
A final comment. It is curious that the sciences of linguistics and semiology—both highly abstruse—should have come into vogue just at this time, when the structures they so learnedly analyze—sentences—are a gruesome mass of rubble. On the professorial level, this corresponds to the inroads of “hopefully” as denoting the utter absence of hope.
Philadelphia and Lawrence, Kansas, November 1973