Category: Language Matters

On the Misuse of Religious Language

A massage parlor is given the name Nirvana, the implication being that after a well-executed massage one will be in the eponymous state. This betrays a misunderstanding of Nirvana, no doubt, but that is not the main thing, which is the perverse tendency to attach a religious or spiritual significance to a merely sensuous state of relaxation.

Why can’t the hedonist just enjoy his sensory states without glorifying them? Equivalently, why can’t he admit that there is something beyond him without attempting to drag it down to his level? But no! He wants to have it both ways: he wants both sensuous indulgence and spirituality. He wants sensuality to be a spiritual experience and spirituality to be as easy of access as sensuous enjoyment.

What’s in a Name?

Mike Gilleland's erudite disquisition on crappy names (craptronyms?) put me in mind of a chess opponent I once faced in a Las Vegas tournament. The fellow, a German, rejoiced under the name of David Assman. It would really have been a hoot had the tournament's venue been Fucking, Austria, near Salzburg. (If a major tournament can be held at Lone Pine, little more than a wide spot on old U.S. 395, why not there?) Yes, muchachos, there really is such a place. The name is pronounced 'fooking.' Although I lived as a young man in Salzburg for six months, I never got to Fucking.

More Zinsser on Writing

William Zinsser, On Writing Well, 5th ed., Chapter 13:

1. "Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around a passive verb." A good rule of thumb.

2. "Passive-voice writers," Zinsser tells us, "prefer long words of Latin origin to short Anglo-Saxon words — which compounds their trouble and makes their sentences still more glutinous." (111) Here again we see that Zinsser has a hard time following his own advice. 'Glutinous' is from the Latin, glutinosus, and means having the quality of glue. Why didn't Zinsser just write 'gummy'?

My point is not that he should have written 'gummy,' but that he ought to reexamine his animus against words of Latin origin, an animus he shares with Orwell.  Brevity and Anglo-Saxonism are values, but there are competing values.

3. "Most adverbs are unnecessary." Yes. "Most adjectives are also unnecessary." Ditto. I would have preferred the quantifier, 'many,' but let's not quibble.

4. "Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: 'a bit,' 'a little,' 'sort of,' 'kind of,' 'rather,' 'quite,' 'very,' 'too,' 'pretty much,' 'in a sense,' and dozens more." (114) And while we are at it, prune 'out' from the sentence just quoted.

5. ". . . let's retire the pompous 'arguably.' Unarguably we don't need it." (114)

Here I must register my disapprobation. One man's pomposity is another's urbanity. I use 'arguably' to mean it is arguable that or it can be plausibly argued that. Employing this phrase, I signal my awareness that the issue in question is difficult and that intelligent people may well disagree. I indicate that I am a civilized fellow and not a rude dogmatist. Example: 'David Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds is arguably the best work of analytic metaphysics to appear in English in the 1980s.' 'Arguably' softens an assertion in need of softening: there are no established criteria of good, better, best in philosophy. There is no call for dogmatism. But if I were engaged in polemic with a leftie, and needed to appear firm before an audience, then more bluntness and less urbanity would be in order.

The same goes for 'register my disapprobation.' I could have written, ' Here I must disagree.' If I were an engineer writing a technical report, I would cut to the chase and elide the ornate. But I'm not. Why should I not make use of my vocabulary? Should dancers execute only the simplest steps? Ought all buildings be Bauhaus?

"Style," said Schopenhauer, "is the physiognomy of the mind." I would add that we don't all have the minds of simpletons.

Zinsser on Writing

I found William Zinsser, On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction, 5th ed., in a discard bin  a while back for a quarter. A nice find and a good read. His politics are leftish, are they not? But I won't hold that against him. From what I have read, his advice is good. Like Orwell before him, he urges a style spare and stripped-down: "the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components." (p.7) But, like Orwell, he has trouble taking his own advice:

Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what — these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.(p.7)

Suppose we rewrite the sentence in accordance with Zinsser's advice:

Every useless word, every word that could be shortened, every adverb whose meaning is already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what — these are the adulterants that weaken a sentence.

Without changing the thought at all, I took a sentence of 54 words and rewrote it in 39 words, saving 15 words. "Thousand and one" is useless filler and false precision, and "weaken the strength of" is pleonasm.

But the deeper issue is whether a lean style is always best. Why should every long word be traded in for a short one? It is a bit like demanding that one always dress in a purely functional way, stripping from one's apparel all ornamentation. That would get rid of all ties, especially those most precious of ties, the bow tie. Think of all the 'fashion accessories' the ladies would have to renounce.

I'm a sartorial functionalist myself, and wouldn't be caught dead in a bow tie or in suspenders. Formal attire for me is anything in excess of my 'loincloth.' But in my writing I compensate: I allow myself a modicum of elegance, a bit of leisurely strut and glide. I thumb my nose at editors and schoolmarms who think all prose must fit the same crabbed mold. I won't apologize for 'modicum' or 'sartorial' or for an allusion to Sartor Resartus; if the reader doesn't get it, that is his problem. Are we writing only for the culturally retarded?

And is it always wrong to use an adverb whose meaning is already in the verb? Mocking Al Franken, I may describe him as a 'lying liar' thus rubbing his nose in his own idiotic redundancy.

These quibbles notwithstanding, Zinsser's book promises both pleasure and instruction.

George Orwell on Good Writing

George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" (1946) is an essay all should read. As timely now as it was sixty two years ago, it is available in several anthologies and on-line here. Orwell lays down the following rules for good writing.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (A Collection of Essays, Harvest, 1981, p. 170)

On balance, this is excellent advice. Orwell's formulation of these rules, however, is excessively schoolmarmish, so much so that he himself cannot abide by them. Take (3) for example. It's a rule violated by its own formulation. Had Orwell followed his own advice, he would have deleted 'always.' Or consider this sentence near the beginning of his essay: "Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse." (p. 156) Surely, 'inevitably' is redundant. Or else 'must' is redundant. The sentence as Orwell wrote it, however, is not a bad sentence. My point is that his rules are too restrictive.

Now look at (5). This rule contradicts what he himself says on the preceding page. There (p. 169) he asks what his defence of the English language does not imply. One of the things it does not imply is "in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one…." This obviously contradicts rule (5).

At the root of the problem is the tendency most of have to reach for such universal quantifiers as 'all,' 'every,' 'no' and 'never' when strict accuracy demands something less ringing. If the great Orwell can fall into the trap, then we lesser mortals need to be especially careful. Good writing cannot be reduced to the application of rules. Rules are at best guidelines.

These quibbles aside, this essay is required reading.

What is Language? Tool, Enabler, Dominatrix?

I have spoken before, romantically no doubt, of the mother tongue as our alma mater, our dear mother to whom we owe honor. Matrix of our thoughts, she is deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.

So I was pleased to come across a similar, albeit more trenchant, observation in Karl Kraus' Beim Wort Genommen, pp. 134-135:

Ich beherrsche die Sprache nicht; aber die Sprache beherrscht mich vollkommen. Sie ist mir nicht die Dienerin meiner Gedanken. Ich lebe in einer Verbindung mit ihr, aus der ich Gedanken empfange, und sie kann mit mir machen, was sie will. Ich pariere ihr aufs Wort. Denn aus dem Wort springt mir der junge Gedanke entgegen und formt rueckwirkend die Sprache, die ihn schuf. Solche Gnade der Gedankentraechtigkeit zwingt auf die Knie und macht allen Aufwand zitternder Sorgfalt zur Pflicht. Die Sprache ist eine Herrin der Gedanken, und wer das Verhaeltnis umzukehren vermag, dem macht sie sich im Hause nuetzlich, aber sie sperrt ihm der Schoss.

I do not dominate language; she dominates me completely. She is not the servant of my thoughts. I live in a relation with her from which I receive thoughts, and she can do with me what she will. I follow her orders. For from the word the fresh thought springs, forming retroactively the language that created it. The grace of language, pregnant with thought, forces me to my knees and makes a duty of my expenditure of trembling conscientiousness. Language is a mistress of thought. To anyone who would reverse the relationship, she makes herself useful but denies access to her womb.

I might have translated Herrin as dominatrix if I wanted to accentuate the masochistic tone of the passage. 'Mistress' is obviously to be read as the female counterpart of 'master.'