The Death of The English Language

It has finally happened. It has been centuries in the making. It has been predicted, documented, noted with dismay. Let it not be said that we were not warned, but in our ignorance we stood by and we did nothing.

The English Language, for centuries a mainstay of our culture, our nature, our communication with each other, lies broken and abused; weeping like a lost child in a supermarket aisle… No, with the tears of a mother as her son is sentenced to life imprisonment… No, as a donkey might weep in the… Oh this is just pointless.

You see? I can’t even make a metaphor any more!

Wait… An analogy! Gah!

The language is dead, and with it goes our ability to think! Without English, how shall we express reason, and logic, and beauty?

We’d have to learn French…

Of course, all the above is complete codswallop, but you’d be surprised at how many people genuinely believe that not only is our language utterly imperative to our thought processes, but also that in some way it’s declining, or dying, or suffering from an invasion. Of course, despite centuries of panic amongst the well-educated that language is becoming a lost skill, they still somehow manage to find the words to express their fears afresh every generation. So, we shall move on swiftly to the bit…

In Which I Insult George Orwell

One of the favourite essays amongst the concerned is George Orwell’s ‘Politics and the English Language’. In what I described elsewhere as a ‘vacuous diatribe’, the late George Orwell shared with us his innermost misgivings concerning our mother tongue. He claimed that tired, overused metaphors were indicative of, and would encourage, tired, wooly thinking. That if we all used common and well-worn phrases and metaphors, our ability to think rationally would be compromised. In the essay he also laid down six ‘rules’ which we should seek to follow if we want to speak thoughtfully on the subject of politics.

What utter trite it is, too. Even ignoring the malodorous hypocrisy of George Orwell laying down the ‘rules’ on how we can and cannot think and write, the whole essay reads like a parody of itself. In fact, if Orwell were famed for his subtlety of wit then I would happily believe that this is exactly what it is. Much merriment was made at the expense of his his ‘Rule 3’ (“If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out”) on Twitter yesterday: suggestions of variations with lower word-counts ranged from ‘If a word is unnecessary, remove it‘, through ‘Brevity rocks!‘ and ‘no filler‘ to the rather epic ‘Shh‘.

Now, I didn’t really start writing this post to attack Orwell, although attacking Orwell is where the idea for this post began. He was a fine essayist, did excellent work in describing the inherent problems with communism so simply that 12-year-old schoolchildren have been bored to tears by them ever since, and rather brilliantly provided fodder for conspiracy theorists and paranoid libertarians to wave at us and send to our representatives ever since1. The real bees in my bonnet are…

The Grammar Nazis

You’ve seen these guys around. The ones who’ll crawl out of the woodwork to remind you that you said ‘less’ when you meant ‘fewer’, that you shouldn’t start a sentence with ‘But’ or end it with ‘to’. That splitting infinitives is Wrong.

I know them well, because occasionally I am one of them. And this makes me despise them all the more.

You know what? I like to boldly go – if I was to go boldly I’d ruin the metre. Ending a sentence with a preposition is something I can put up with. Who cares how I say something, when what is important is what I’m saying2. The Grammar Nazis are the written equivalent of the audiophile who cares more about audio quality and compression artefacts than they do about music; or the economist who ‘knows the price of everything but the value of nothing’. They are, to make Orwell spin round once more in his grave, missing the wood for the trees. They don’t understand…

The Problem With the Rules

The worst thing is that neither the Grammar Nazis nor the lamenters of language seem to realise the trouble they cause to those who are just trying to write their ideas down to share with others. With their rules and their regulations and their cares and their worries they make it sound like writing well is hard. It puts would-be writers off writing, since their only experience of it is time spent in a classroom being admonished by a teacher for not understanding the absurd and pointless rules of English grammar.

‘Writing well’, doesn’t mean ‘following the rules’, it means expressing yourself clearly through the written word. Words are our slaves, not our masters. We don’t have to conform to their rules – hell, we can even make them up as we go along! Do you think Shakespeare wrote “Still am I call’d. Unhand me, gentlemen” and then looked up, pensively, and asked “Unhand? Is that a word?”

Even Orwell’s pet peeve, the overused metaphor, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. We humans are creatures of habit and far more likely to understand a phrase which we’ve read before. Even more crucially, Orwell conflates understanding the intention of the metaphor with understanding its meaning. For instance, if I was to describe myself as ‘hoist by my own petard’, you wouldn’t need a deep understanding of 16th century warfare to recognise the intention behind my sentence. You’ve had previous exposure to it and understand its intention – even if you (like I) assumed it probably meant ‘hung by my own rope’ rather than ‘blown into the air by my own bomb’.

If your message is clear, your writing is good. What’s more, if you enjoyed writing it, you succeeded. That’s not to say that language cannot be more than this; that words cannot move mountains, topple empires or bind princes and paupers together in love everlasting. I don’t know about you, though, but I find mountain moving and the indiscretions of royalty are best left to the professionals. When writing a humble letter or a blog post, empire toppling is probably superfluous to requirements.

The English Language is Dead! Long Live the English Language!

Of course, it wouldn’t be so bad if they were actually saying something worthwhile – if our ability to process language was somehow declining, or that such a decline would inevitably lead to a collapse in our ability to process rational thought. The problem is, they’re wrong. Self-evidently, horribly, drastically wrong. The whole theory of the ‘decline of English’ seems to rest in the anecdotal evidence of random observers who use little more than an story or two about how the ‘youth of today’ seem to miss vowels out of text messages3 to justify their claims and expect us to take them at face value. Go and ask a linguist if the English Language is in decline.

Even before we ask the Language Log, though, consider the rise of blogging and citizen journalism over the past decade. Look at the blogosphere – do you really see a language in decline, or do you see a rather amazing range of thoughts and ideas on a massive variety of topics, clearly, eloquently and in some cases poetically explained for no reason other than that the writer takes pleasure from writing?

It isn’t hard to see that the English language, far from being in terminal decline, is as fighting fit as it ever was, and ready for yet another millennium of service to the English-speaking peoples of the world.

So, if the Grammar Nazis have got your tongue and you’d like some constructive pointers on writing, take a look at Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘How to Write With Style‘. If you’re interested in the English Language and how it has grown and been shaped, changed, debated, discussed, worried about, frowned upon and celebrated over its long and fascinating history, go and read Melvyn Bragg’s The Adventure of English. If you’d like to understand the truly woeful tendency among the English natives to bemoan the death of their language/manners/younger generation/footballers/shops/community, I would most certainly recommend Watching the English by Kate Fox.

And if none of that has convinced you to ignore those who take what can be most accurately described as an Orwellian approach to language, I’ll leave you with the quote from a wildly unsuccessful author which for a long time adorned the ‘About’ page on this very blog:

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”

Cyril Connolly

  1. Of course, by Orwell’s own rules Nineteen Eighty-Four would be banned from any discussion of totalitarianism, as it is most certainly a ‘tired’ and ‘overused’ metaphor which I am definitely ‘used to seeing in print’. [↩]
  2. My wife, of course, might take issue with my writing the above, since I took to her dissertation with gleeful gusto and a red biro, but that’s different – she was being marked for that. [↩]
  3. This is a criticism I’ve never quite figured out. Stripping letters from words in SMS messages is a particularly intelligent thing to do – it saves time writing the message on a small keypad and saves money, since it allows you to fit more information into a single 160 character text message. What’s the big problem here? [↩]