By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ A long time ago I had the pleasure of reading George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” It’s still considered such a classic that it remains anthologized and I have brought it to the attention of many of my students. Orwell (author of 1984 and Animal Farm if you –I shudder to think – have never heard of him or his books) in the hopes that they would be favorably influenced by this brilliant and lucid writer. I emphasize ‘lucid’ because it is sorely lacking – lucidity – in a lot of what we see today, not only from students but so-called professionals as well. So that’s what this blog will be about.
First, on a personal note, let me explain a few things. From early on I always wanted to be a writer. I read, as they say, voraciously, but usually fell asleep in class when they were diagramming sentences and talking about gerunds and participles, stuff like that. For me, the appeal was the magic of the words themselves, the ability of language to evoke emotions in me that painting, sculpture, and music – sometimes even dance – can do as well. The difference was that I was good with my native language, not with the other disciplines. My father was a painter but I couldn’t even draw a circle (now I suspect that a lot of the frauds that produce ‘modern’ art can’t do it either), so fingerpainting was my limit. When I tried to sing, the dogs would howl and the cattle stampede. Sculpture? I could cut meat. Dancing? I was like a guy about to shit himself rushing to a public toilet.
My love of words led me to Edgar Allen Poe and then to a thesaurus so I could understand what he was saying. My first school essays and stories, thus, were full of words such as ‘lugubrious’ and ‘phantasmagoric’. This was long before ChatGPT which many of the young scholars now use to falsify their essays, so my teachers must have pissed themselves laughing and trying to imagine where I came up with such pretentious nonsense. But they indulged me, and I think one or two of them intuitively understood that the language was working in my brain, spirit, and very being on different levels than mere dictionary definitions. I couldn’t have described it then, but language to me was like a perfect lover: irresistibly seductive, mysterious, and wildly fulfilling.
I learned to write by imitating the authors who became my masters: Poe, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and others. Because of them, and because English language was my native tongue, I found I could get by without memorizing all the silly grammar rules. My talent was that I knew – how I knew I didn’t know – but I knew what great language was supposed to sound like. Even now, after a long life of trial and error, I appreciate that this was my one special ‘gift from God’. And as anybody who is good at anything understands, such a lucky ability gives a sense of power. With words, as in no other realm of life, I have always felt like I actually know what I’m doing.
My problem, like many another of my breed, was that I was ‘in love with the sound of my own voice’. I loved words, but I didn’t have a clue as to the concept of ‘brevity’ or ‘economy’ with these instruments of communication. I was swinging for the fences every time, and a lot of the home runs I thought I was hitting were when I was drunk. Yep, I would write my own version of “Fern Hill” or “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, go to sleep (pass out) ecstatic, and then wonder the next morning why and how it had all turned into such a pile of shit during the night.
I fought it and fought it, but gradually I learned that, with language anyway, less often really is more. But not only did I have to learn to tone it down in terms of bombast, I also had to acquire humility. I had to learn to respect the language, and this meant becoming – or trying to become – a craftsman. I had to accept that being a poet amounted to more than trying to act like a poet – which to me meant getting drunk and dancing on the table top, showing up late if at all, and trying to get pussy by reciting “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” at the top of my boozy voice to some unsuspecting lass who sometimes fell for it but more likely thought I was crazy. After one of those performances, if they fucked me, it was probably out of curiosity – or pity – as much as desire.
To cut a long story short, I am now a sour old man with profound respect for the ‘spare’ aspects of beautiful language. Language shorn of frills, texts barren of unnecessary verbiage and show-off loquaciousness, ‘Just the facts, Ma’am’ – as Sergeant Friday the LA cop used to say on the TV program “Dragnet” back in the American days of big cars with big gas tanks. I have finally realized that great language communicates – it is not designed to obfuscate or bewilder or impress-by-excess. And the best way to communicate is by precision and discipline suffused with a love for the intrinsic power and beauty our alphabet is capable of and the nuances and shadows of words. If you are a writer, it is or should be a point of honor to render expression in its purest form, all the while remembering that simplicity and simple are two different things. Great language flows; it seems to spring from its source as naturally as wind in the trees or a river heading for the sea. Often it is something extremely difficult made to look easy. That’s the secret.
Unfortunately, the world we live in today seems to thrive on a many-faceted corruption, distortion, and general abuse of language, most of it the fault of people who, as Orwell pointed out, don’t really care what they are saying. Or they do care to the point of using language as propaganda – indeed as they say today, weaponizing language. Here, and for the rest of this essay, I want to model some of the many ways in which western culture in particular makes a cellpool of the English language.
First on the list is the politically correct euphemism. Now let’s get something straight right out of the blocks: sometimes it is not only appropriate to soften the words we use but also uncivilized not to. It is a matter of decency and common sense. That’s why we say, “I hear that your grandmother passed away last week, and I want to express my condolences.” Or “I understand you lost your father recently. I am so sorry.” You don’t say, “So your Granny snuffed it?” Or “‘Word on the street is, you Pop croaked.” You say, “I had to put my faithful old dog Shep down yesterday (or ‘put him to sleep’); you don’t walk in and announce, “Guess what? I just euthanized my canine.” The same logic can be used with ‘old’ (elderly), ‘fat’ (obese), and ‘ugly’ (plain). Let’s show a little bit of compassion ok?
Any fool ought to pick up on what I am saying here. But it can be carried to extremes, and the PC police love to do it. That’s why short people become ‘vertically challenged’, retarded people become ‘mentally challenged’ and handicapped people become ‘physically challenged’. Disabled people (handicapped) become ‘differently abled.’
Have you ever noticed that these days everything is a fucking ‘CHALLENGE’? People don’t have problems any more; they have ‘challenges’. And ‘issues’. Well, let me tell you something, mate. If you are trying to learn the Finnish language. Or Gaelic. Or Hebrew – ok THAT is a ‘challenge.’ If you don’t have the drug money and Tyrone the Dealer and his Boyz are on their way over to slit your throat, you have a goddamned PROBLEM, Buddy !!! A big P-R-O-B-L-E-M.
Why is it that nobody has a problem anymore? It’s because the corporate crowd and the PC mob have decided that it sounds negative. So… let’s put a positive spin on it!!! And if your company is about to go bankrupt, it doesn’t mean you are working at a deficit (you lost your ass), nope, now you made a ‘negative profit’. That’s right. A negative profit. If you get the axe in your job (fired) for no good reason at all, it’s because the company decided to ‘streamline’, ‘restructure’, ‘downsize’ , cut back’, ‘scale down’, ‘retrench’, take ‘resource action’ – and that’s why you were ‘made redundant’ or ‘laid off’. If you just plain get fired for being a waste of space, you are ‘terminated’. And if you are a lazy bastard who won’t work, you are ‘between jobs.’
Have you noticed that these days (among the philosophically enlightened) that everybody is on some kind of a JOURNEY? I don’t mean from Hull to Newcastle, or Pittsburgh to Philly. I mean ‘Life’s journey.’ What in fact you are is just another hack moving inexorably from youth to age and trying to figure out why you have screwed things up so much so far. THAT’S the ‘journey’. Now don’t get me wrong. The FIRST TIME that I heard someone talking about their life being a ‘journey’, I thought “ Damn!! How poetic”. It was only after hearing it a million times that it started to grate. Like boys named Tyler and girls named Megan. Barf.
Politicians are always disturbed by bad news. Juvenile criminals are troubled youth. An average inattentive little bugger at school is gifted. Some politician or corporate son of a bitch trying to avoid being found guilty of a crime always denies it ‘categorically’. Politicians in particular find many things ‘unacceptable.’ A pupil or student is now a learner, whether he/she is actually learning anything or not. In the UK people always earn such-and-such a salary even if they do nothing but sit on their ass and collect the dosh. A care-giver or nursing assistant is a carer, whether they actually care or not. Teachers are now facilitators. Whores (bless their hearts because I like them) are sex workers. Dishwashers are post-culinary sanitation attendants. Janitors are custodial engineers. A soldier who is ‘shell-shocked’ is now a victim of ‘post traumatic stress syndrome.’ In warfare villages are left full of collateral damage, if not entirely liquidated. Dopers are substance abusers.
Moreover, everybody who can pick snot out of his nose is a guru and everyone who ever had a song in the Top 100 or played a dead body in a “B” film is a legend.
I could go on and on and on with this, but hopefully you get the point. The other day I even heard a list of names which transgenders call normal biological women: non-transgenders, menstruators, cisgender, uterus carriers, etc., which are clear examples of the same kind of ‘insensitivity’ the trannies often claim to be victims of themselves. In fact, as we know, there are a million insulting names to call people, just as there are a million to confer a phony status or soften reality to an absurd degree.
Example: for me, an Eskimo is not an Innuit, nor is a gypsy a Roma. No way do I mean to insult these people by referring to them as I have long been in the habit of doing. It’s just that I can’t think of a good reason to call them anything else unless they ask me, and so far none of them ever has. ‘Native American’ as opposed to ‘Indian’? OK, because it’s accurate. But why is it insulting to call one football team the Kansas City Chiefs but not insulting to call another one the Dallas Cowboys? Don’t ranch hands and rodeo workers deserve a little respect too?
It’s like changing traditionally uncountable nouns like ‘material’, ‘food’, ‘fruit’, behavior’ and ‘money’ to materials, foods, fruits, behaviors, and monies. It’s like the trend in saying “I’m wanting something to eat,” and “I’m needing your help” instead of “I want something to eat” and “I need your help.” Show me the improvement in lousing up the language like that and you have just won yourself another customer. But if you can’t show me how it makes life better, then screw it; I’m not buying into it. Same with technology. Build an escalator to convey me from a deep hole to back to the earth’s surface, and I will ride. But automate a McDonald’s so that I have to order my meal from a computer instead of talking to the real-life goofball behind the counter, and you can kiss my ass. I’ll go elsewhere.
In the end, we should respect language by making it as honest and precise as we can. This goes for daily life as well as any attempt to write poetry. We all know – or else should know – that language means identity. The first thing that conquerors do after killing the men and raping the women is to render the native language of the vanquished inoperable or extinct, replacing it with the lingo of the victorious. It’s about power, not improvement.
Every culture has its own way of talking and writing, right down to the last joke. A woman in the writhing ecstasy of sex does not cry out to her lover “Have intercourse with me ! Have intercourse with me!!” No. But guess what she does say? So be precise. And don’t be afraid.
Therefore, my advice is to say what you mean and mean what you say. Render your words, which are the verbal song of your intellect and soul, as eloquently and accurately as you can. Take a 100-word essay and try cutting it to 500. You’ll often be astonished to find that the 500-word revision is better. And don’t embellish needlessly. Don’t bullshit. Just do your best and have faith in the integrity of your own tale..
I remember reading Camus’s novel L’Etranger. In the standard translation, Meursault, the doomed protagonist, who is finally taken from his prison cell to the guillotine to have his head chopped off, is greeted by the mocking mob with “howls of execration.”
I liked that version until one day I saw another translation in which Meursault is simply greeted with ‘cries of hate’.
I have decided that I like that version better. It’s more to the point.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
