On the Accuracy of Language

The august body of French language gatekeepers known as the Academie Francaise has always seemed a bit silly to me. I mean, they were founded by the notorious Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, so that's already a shadowy beginning. They didn't have any women in the rank files of their forty "immortels" (as they are called in all non-humility) for about three hundred years, and just got their first Maghrebite four years ago (hurray for Assia Djebar!). Their goal is to maintain the purity of the French language by publishing a dictionary that delineates which words are or are not acceptable as French. Le Computer? Heavens, no- l'ordinateur. Le software? No again- le logiciel. And so on. And besides, thanks to my father's brainwashing, I don't believe in prescriptive linguistics anyway. Language is a living thing, it evolves according to the changes in the realities it tries to represent. You can't really prescribe language use for people or impose linguistic parameters on them since language itself comes from the people, is not artificial, and can only be measured or recorded, not prescribed. And I'm somewhat sympathetic to the leftist linguists who decry language prescription on the basis that such prescription only becomes a tool for certain groups to distinguish themselves from others, often to the disadvantage or detriment of the poor, the outcast, the downtrodden.

We certainly don't need a similar body for the English language, and though I am a fan of the OED, it doesn't perform nearly the same role as the Academie Francaise-- serving, as it does, more as a record of language as it is used rather than a prescription for how language OUGHT to be used.

Reading Tocqueville has caused me to reconsider some of my animus against the immortals of the French Academy, however. He points out that democratic societies(and the United States in particular) inherently do not achieve the level of precision in their language that other societies (particularly aristocratic societies- at least in 1835 when he was writing- like France) reach:

"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." (Goldhammer ed., p. 550).

It seems that Americans have an almost horseshoe-like quality in their expressions of language. Often, we do not aim for precision in our speech, but rather for approximation. With the meanings of words only approximate and not fixed or regulated by a "tribunal" as in France, everyone is free to imbue words with their own personal or individualized meanings. While this may please the deconstructionists among us, it would cause disaster, and in fact, it already has begun to do so. I am sickened, for example, to hear talk of people buying or selling a "home." You can't do that! You can only sell a "house," a thing made out of earthly materials-- walls, linoleum, stone, siding. A "home" can neither be sold nor bought; it is something that money simply cannot buy. When realtors promise you a "home," they are lying and corrupting our language at the same time, as well as guilty of profanation and simony for promising to sell that which is sacred.

The lack of linguistic regulation in our country and the resultant approximation in language use may help to explain the (post-)adolescent affinity for the word "like," as in "I was, like, going to the store today, and I like saw these apples, and like they weren't expensive, so I like bought them." (Post-)Adolescents can't seem to commit themselves to stating that they simply went to the store, saw some inexpensive apples, and then bought them. They live in uncertainties and often experience only approximations. This is why I try to emphasize precision in language in my students' papers, because approximate thinking won't do in a world and a life full of complex challenges requiring clarity and discernment.

Sports slogans, trade jingles, and soundbites only make things worse. I once had a student tell me that the message of a certain film was that "through education, you can achieve your destiny." I told her I didn't really know what that means. Did she believe in destiny? If you believe in destiny, then why can you only achieve it through education? I thought destiny was destiny, and not something to be achieved. It turns out that she meant that through education, people can reach their greatest potential (still only an approximate and cliche-ridden phrase, but a step upward nevertheless). And yet our very own universities, in their glossy brochures, commit such egregious crimes against the English language all the time when they promise students that their institution will help them precisely to "achieve their destiny" and other such absurd Jedi-talk.

Corporate interests, or at least our collective lack of resistance against them, have also contributed their fair share of the corruption of our language. My grandmother once asked me to go get her her "Skin So Soft," since her skin was dry and she needed some lotion. I wished she had simply asked me to get her her lotion, because to include (false) advertising in the very name of an object is a rank perversion of language. I want to eat chicken, not "I Feel Like Chicken Tonight," have sugar cereal, not Lucky Charms (think about it- eating lucky charms actually sounds kind of gross), and drink orange drink, not Sunny Delight. I give people tissues, not Kleenexes. And the corporate perversion of our language has gone so far that I sometimes find myself standing completely mystified at the Ben and Jerry's counter, wondering what the heck Chunky Monkey is doing on the menu (sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie) and why I can't just have a scoop of banana ice cream. I was once drinking a Mountain Dew in Germany, and my friends had no idea what it was, and wanted to know what the German translation for it was. When I explained it to them, they thought it was weird that a drink (especially one produced in a chemical laboratory) would be named after the moisture found in the grass on a mountain in the morning.

George Steiner commented on the corruption inherent in the German language during and after the fall of the Third Reich. So did Henry James, during Word War I, anticipating Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. James writes

One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one's words as to enure one's thoughts. The war has used up words: they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through an increase in limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.

George Orwell likewise criticized the perversion of language in 1984- isn't that where he used the neologism "superdoubleplusungood"? I have oftened wondered what the Nephites meant exactly when they said that the Mulekites' language had become "corrupted," but the above reflections, I think, may bring me to a nearer understanding of just what was going on.

Maybe the Academie Francaise isn't such a ridiculous institution after all.

Confession and the Surveillance Society

It seems that confessions are replacing baseball as our national past-time. Eliot Spitzer, Jim McGreevy, John Edwards, Mark Sanford and far too many others are clogging up the airwaves with their heartfelt, public confessions, loyal wives at their sides, promising penitence and reform. I have never understood the "loyal wife" role in such cases, though I do sympathize strongly with notions like repentance and forgiveness, some of the first lessons of marriage, after all. But at least Jenny Sanford had the good sense to be out of town with the kids while her husband went on and on about his "soul mate" in Argentina before a live national audience.

Part of what troubles me about these confessions is that there is a sense that a good, public confession will settle everything and that afterwards everyone can go back to business as usual, as though the act of confession itself, particularly when performed publically, serves as an automatic expiatory balm that sets everything in order again. And given our heavily Protestant culture, we do not really understand what private confession is, causing me to wonder aloud with John Proctor in Arthur Miller's excellent play, The Crucible, "Is there no penitence but it be public?"

Certainly, Puritans and Protestants have long turned to their private journals for their confessions, filling in a space for penitence left empty by the absence of the confession booth. But today, in an age where the sacred divide between public and private is collapsing, where the written word can be quickly disseminated to thousands, and where blogs are often performing, particularly among young people, many of the functions of the now almost anachronistic "private diary," it appears indeed that there is hardly ANY form of communication anymore but it be public. So out come the Ted Haggarts, the Kobe Bryants, the David Patersons, and so on.

Of course, it is precisely the loss of this distinction between the public and the private sphere that leads to such a confessional society. When technology allows us to gaze into the lives of others-- think reality shows (with their appropriately-titled "confessional" scenes), blogs, the social networking sites such as the mystical one our esteemed Secretary of State once referred to as "MyFace" and my mother regularly calls "Spacebook," YouTube moments that derail presidential aspirations ("Macaca," Mr. Allen? - "I respect and will protect a woman's right to choose," Mr. Romney?) and invite access to the most intimate of strangers, not to mention wiretapping, patriotic library snooping, and ever-present surveillance cameras, whether I'm buying groceries or visiting the restroom at the public library (yes, they even have cameras in there...)-- confession becomes a necessity, since there is a sense that everyone is already watching, so we may as well come clean, and thereby claim our subjecthood by rejecting the inevitable objectification of ourselves that such a surveillance society surely brings.

Little wonder, then, that Arthur Miller's Puritan Salem would require such public confessions, "nailed to the church," for here was also a society under constant surveillance, not from the technologies available to us today, but from the close scrutiny and watchful eye of neighbors under which everyone in the community lived. And little wonder that my students, accustomed to constant connection (albeit artificial) with others, and to the ensuing surveillance by others into their private lives that such a connection ensures, all too often confess transgressions and intimacies related to their personal lives in the writing assignments that they hand in to me, something which embarrasses me but seems natural to many of them. After all, if my Facebook site, my blog posts, my YouTube clips and my loud, public cell-phone conversations have already revealed these things, why keep them from my professor?

Because a confessional society is a surveillance society, and a surveillance society is a confessional society.