HOW AMERICAN DEMOCRACY HAS CHANGED THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
IF the reader has fully grasped what I have said thus far about literature in general, he will have no trouble imagining the kind of influence that a democratic social state and democratic institutions can exert on language itself — and language is thought’s primary instrument.
To tell the truth, American authors live more in England than in their own country, since they study English writers constantly and use them every day as models. This is not true of the population itself, which is much more immediately affected by factors peculiar to the United States. Attention should therefore be focused not on the written but on the spoken language if one hopes to observe the changes that the idiom of an aristocratic people may undergo when it becomes the language of a democracy.
Educated Englishmen, better able to appreciate these delicate nuances than I, have often assured me that the language spoken by the enlightened classes in the United States is notably different from that spoken by the same classes in Great Britain.
Their complaint was not only that Americans had introduced many new words — the difference and the distance between the two countries would have been enough to explain that — but that those new words were borrowed especially from the jargon of the parties, the mechanical arts, or the language of business. They added that old English words were often given new meanings by Americans. Finally, they said that the inhabitants of the United States frequently mixed styles in a singular manner, sometimes putting together words that in the mother country were customarily kept apart.
These remarks, which were made to me on several occasions by people who struck me as worthy of belief, induced me to reflect on this subject myself, and my reflections led me, by way of theory, to the same conclusion they had reached through practice.
In aristocracies, language inevitably partakes of the general ambience of repose. Few new words are created, because few new things come to pass. If anyone did anything new, moreover, they would try to describe it using familiar words whose meaning had been fixed by tradition.
If, in such societies, the human mind at length succeeds in rousing itself, or if enlightenment comes to it from without, people will begin to coin new expressions, and these will tend to have a learned, intellectual, and philosophical character indicating that they do not owe their birth to a democracy. When the fall of Constantinople turned the tide of science and literature toward the West, the French language was almost immediately invaded by a multitude of new words, all of which had their roots in Greek or Latin. Erudite neologisms came into use in France at this time, but only by the enlightened classes, and the people never felt the effect of this, or did so only in the long run.
The same phenomenon can be observed in every nation in Europe. Milton alone introduced more than six hundred words into the English language, nearly all of them derived from Latin, Greek, or Hebrew.
By contrast, the perpetual fluidity that is so prominent a feature of democracy is forever reshaping the face of language as well as of business. The general agitation and intellectual competition elicit a large number of new ideas. Old ideas may vanish or reappear or ramify to produce countless subtle variants.
Consequently, some words must be retired from use, while others have to be introduced.
Furthermore, democratic nations love change for its own sake. This can be seen in language as well as in politics. They sometimes feel a desire to change words even when there is no need.
The genius of democratic peoples is revealed not only by the large number of new words they introduce but also by the nature of the ideas those new words represent.
With such peoples, the majority makes the law in regard to language as in regard to everything else. Now, the majority is more concerned with business than with studies and more concerned with political and commercial interests than with philosophical speculations or belles-lettres. Most of the words it coins or accepts will bear the hallmark of these habits. They will serve primarily to express the needs of industry, the passions of the parties, or the details of public administration. This is the direction in which language will expand constantly, whereas it will gradually abandon the terrain of metaphysics and theology.
As for the source from which democratic nations draw their new words and the way in which they go about fabricating them, both are easily described.
Men who live in democratic countries have little notion of the languages spoken in Rome and Athens and see no need to search back all the way to Antiquity for the expressions they need. If they resort on occasion to learned etymologies, it is usually vanity that causes them to rummage about in dead languages and not erudition that calls ancient words to mind as a matter of course. Sometimes it is the most ignorant among them who use such words most often. The very democratic desire to move beyond one’s proper sphere often leads them to embellish a quite menial calling with a Greek or Latin name. The lower the craft, the more remote from learning, the more pompous and erudite the name. Thus, for example, our tightrope walkers have turned themselves into acrobats and funambulists.
Instead of borrowing from dead languages, democratic peoples prefer to borrow from living ones, for they are in constant communication with one another, and men from different countries readily imitate one another because they become more alike with each passing day.
Democratic peoples do most of their innovating in their own tongues, however. On occasion they will restore a forgotten expression to prominence or take a term peculiar to a particular class of citizens and introduce it in a figurative sense into the common tongue. A host of expressions that initially belonged to the specialized language of a party or profession have thus come into general circulation.
The most common expedient employed by democratic peoples for the purpose of linguistic innovation is to bestow an unusual meaning on an expression already in use. This method is very simple, very quick, and very convenient. No knowledge is necessary for its use, and ignorance may even facilitate it. But it subjects the language to great perils. By doubling the sense of a word in this way, democratic peoples sometimes cast doubt on both the retained meaning and the acquired one.
An author begins by slightly bending the original meaning of a known expression, and, having altered it in this way, he does his best to adapt it to his subject. Another author comes along and bends the meaning in another direction. A third takes it down yet another path, and since there is no common arbiter, no permanent tribunal that can fix the meaning of the word once and for all, the situation remains fluid. As a result, it seems as if writers almost never stick to a single thought but always aim at a group of ideas, leaving it to the reader to judge which one has been hit.
This is an unfortunate consequence of democracy. I would rather see the French tongue bristle with Chinese, Tartar, or Huron words than allow the meaning of words to become uncertain. Harmony and homogeneity are only secondary beauties of language. These qualities are largely matters of convention, and if necessary one can do without them. But good language is impossible without clear terms.
Equality necessarily changes language in several other ways.
In aristocratic centuries, during which each nation tends to hold itself apart from all others and prefers to present a distinctive face to the world, it is common for peoples that share a common origin to become quite alien to one another, so that even though each continues to understand the others, they cease to speak in the same way.
At such times, too, each nation is divided into a certain number of classes, which see little of one another and do not mix at all. Each of these classes adopts and clings to certain intellectual habits peculiar to itself and prefers certain words and terms that are passed on from generation to generation, like an inheritance. Thus out of the common idiom comes a language of the poor and a language of the rich, a language of commoners and a language of nobles, a language of the learned and a language of the uninitiated. The deeper the divisions and the more insuperable the barriers, the truer this becomes. I am willing to bet that in India language varies enormously from caste to caste and that there is almost as much difference between the language of a pariah and that of a Brahmin as there is between their styles of dress.
By contrast, when men, no longer bound to their place in society, see and communicate with one another constantly, when castes are abolished and classes are replenished with new recruits and become indistinguishable, all the words of the language get mixed together. Those that do not suit the majority perish. The rest form a common stock, from which everyone chooses more or less at random. Nearly all the dialects that used to fragment the idioms of Europe are clearly on their way out. In the New World there is no patois, and the patois of the Old World are daily disappearing.
This revolution in the social state influences style as well as language.
Not only does everyone use the same words, but they become used to employing words indiscriminately. The rules laid down by style are all but abolished. Seldom does one encounter expressions that seem, by their very nature, either vulgar or refined. Because individuals of various ranks bring with them wherever they go expressions and terms they are accustomed to using, the origins of words are lost, like the origins of men, and confusion develops in language as in society.
In the classification of words, there are of course some rules that are not associated with one form of society rather than another but derive instead from the very nature of things. Some expressions and turns of phrase are vulgar because the sentiments they are supposed to express are really low, and others are lofty because the objects they seek to depict are naturally quite high.
The mixing of ranks will never eliminate such differences. But equality cannot fail to destroy what is purely conventional and arbitrary in forms of thought. I am not even sure whether the necessary classification that I indicated above will not always be less respected by democratic peoples than by others, because in a democratic people one does not find men who, by virtue of their education, enlightenment, and leisure, are permanently disposed to study the natural laws of language and to enforce respect for those laws by observing them themselves.
I do not want to abandon this subject without mentioning one last feature of democratic languages that may be more characteristic of them than all the others.
I showed earlier that democratic peoples have a taste and often a passion for general ideas. This is a consequence of their inherent virtues and defects. This love of general ideas manifests itself in democratic languages through the constant use of generic terms and abstract words and by the way in which these are used. Therein lies the great merit of these languages as well as the great weakness.
Democratic peoples are passionate about generic terms and abstract words because such expressions magnify thought and aid the work of the intelligence by allowing a large amount of material to be compressed into a small space.
A democratic writer will speak easily of “capacities” in the abstract rather than of “capable men” and will avoid going into detail about the things to which those capacities may be applied. He will speak of “actualities” to describe at one stroke everything he sees going on before his eyes at that very moment, and he will use the word “eventualities” to encompass anything that might henceforth take place anywhere in the universe.
Democratic writers are forever coining abstract words of this sort, or else they use the abstract words of the language in increasingly abstract senses.
To invigorate their discourse, moreover, they personify these abstractions and set them in action as though they were real individuals. They will say things like, “Circumstances require that capacities must govern.”
I can best illustrate what I mean by my own example.
I have frequently used the word equality in an absolute sense. I have, moreover, personified equality in several places, and so I have said that equality did certain things or refrained from doing certain others. The men of the age of Louis XIV would not have spoken this way. It would never have occurred to them to use the word equality without applying it to something in particular, and they would sooner have given up the word than consent to turn equality into a living being.
Such abstract words, which are so common in democratic languages and which are used constantly without being linked to any particular fact, both magnify thought and cast a veil over it. They make the expression more rapid and the idea less clear. When it comes to language, however, democratic peoples prefer obscurity to effort.
I am not sure, moreover, that vagueness does not possess a certain secret charm for the people who speak and write in democratic nations.
Because the people who live in these countries are often left to rely on their own unaided intelligence, they are almost always wracked by doubt. Furthermore, since their situation is constantly changing, they are never held fast to any of their opinions by the very immobility of their fortune.
Men who live in democratic countries will therefore often have vacillating thoughts; they need very broad expressions to contain them. Since they never know whether the idea to which they are giving voice today will fit the new situation in which they may find themselves tomorrow, they naturally develop a taste for abstract ideas. An abstract word is like a box with a false bottom: you can put in any ideas you please and take them out again without anyone being the wiser.
Generic and abstract terms are the basis of all language. Hence I am not claiming that such words are found only in democratic languages. All I am saying is that men in ages of equality tend to increase the number of words of this type in particular; they tend to take them always in isolation, in their most abstract sense, and to use them incessantly, even when the occasion does not require it.