Steven
Poole has a recent column in The Guardian offering his
contribution to a spate of publications and broadcasts intended to mark 110
years since George Orwell’s birth. While making some nods to his famous critique
of the vague wickedness of much political language, Poole also says Orwell’s
“more general attacks on what he perceives to be bad style are often outright
ridiculous, parading a comically arbitrary concoction of intolerances.” Poole
accuses the famed writer of linguistic xenophobia and of inadvertently
launching what later became “a philistine and joyless campaign in favor of that
shibboleth of dull pedants ‘plain English.’” With the risk of revealing myself
as a dull pedant, I am tempted to suggest that Orwell might have had a point.
To
give some flesh to his accusations, Poole points to words like “extraneous”
which, once newly “minted from the classical will very rapidly seem entirely
normal.” This may, in fact, be the problem. Maybe abstractions which are not
existentially evocative - because they are far removed
from the “metaphors we live by” - should not constitute such a major part of
learned vocabulary? I am reminded of an obscure German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who over two
centuries ago perhaps offered caution against adopting a
language which is, well, extraneous to lived experience. In his view, the
German tribes which had settled on the other side of the Rhein had once made a
terrible mistake by abandoning their mother tongue; and adopting instead a foreign
language detached from their vibrant folk culture. As a result, they had lost
their soul, and succumbed to existential vapidity.
Fichte
was, by current standards, a rabid German nationalist who had
come to despise not only Napoleon, but also his home base of willing
universalists. Yet, he may have hit upon a parsimonious explanation for all
that French pretentiousness in any area you can think of; and for the
rationalist hubris of the French Enlihghtenment. As German history
demonstrates, faithfulness to an existentially evocative language
does not preclude other kinds of intellectual, social and economic
pathologies. But the more relevant point here is that once you have truly
adopted a lifeless idiom, it will feel entirely normal. And
anyone questioning your linguistic self-perception is bound to come across as an other-fearing bigot.
