People care about their language because it forms part of their identity, and part of the resistance to changes in English is a resistance to change itself. But correct usage is not an elite affectation; it is a badge of competence.
(...)
The idea that language can be manipulated to disguise the truth, and even to control and limit thought, is, of course, one of the themes of George Orwell's 1984. Orwell also explored the topic in his famous essay "Politics and the English language," written in 1946. He took five specimens of recent writing to illustrate "various of the mental vices from which we now suffer." The first is a clumsy and contorted sentence by Harold Laski containing so many double negatives that he seems to have ended up saying the opposite of what he meant to say. The second is from another once celebrated intellectual, Lancelot Hogben, whose vices are dying metaphor, pomposity and facetiousness ("we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables"). The third, from an American essay on psychology, is a typical piece of academic prose. The fourth is taken from a ranting communist pamphlet. The last is from a letter published in Tribune, in which rant, pomposity and facetiousness are majestically combined.
(...)
How can an educated person write so badly? The second extract may supply the answer. The meaning towards which Greenfield is groping is probably this: "IT is now so cheap and easy to use that it is having a big effect on our lives." What on earth does "matured into adjectives such as" mean? Is she trying to say something about use of language? Probably not: the likelihood is that "has matured into adjectives such as" is Greenfieldian for "has become." "Tsunami" is pseudo-sophistication, a sort of gimcrack brightness, like those people who say "smorgasbord" for "variety." Insofar as the word makes any sense at all, that sense is wrong: the writer does not mean to say that the effect of home computers on our lives has been sudden, violent and destructive.
(...)
Popularisation need not and should not be patronising.
(...)
Civilisation was popular, and something of the same kind could be popular again now, for there is in the land a hunger to be more serious. The hungry sheep look up, and it is time for them to be fed; why, there might even be money in it.
Read on from Prospect magazine
(...)
The idea that language can be manipulated to disguise the truth, and even to control and limit thought, is, of course, one of the themes of George Orwell's 1984. Orwell also explored the topic in his famous essay "Politics and the English language," written in 1946. He took five specimens of recent writing to illustrate "various of the mental vices from which we now suffer." The first is a clumsy and contorted sentence by Harold Laski containing so many double negatives that he seems to have ended up saying the opposite of what he meant to say. The second is from another once celebrated intellectual, Lancelot Hogben, whose vices are dying metaphor, pomposity and facetiousness ("we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables"). The third, from an American essay on psychology, is a typical piece of academic prose. The fourth is taken from a ranting communist pamphlet. The last is from a letter published in Tribune, in which rant, pomposity and facetiousness are majestically combined.
(...)
How can an educated person write so badly? The second extract may supply the answer. The meaning towards which Greenfield is groping is probably this: "IT is now so cheap and easy to use that it is having a big effect on our lives." What on earth does "matured into adjectives such as" mean? Is she trying to say something about use of language? Probably not: the likelihood is that "has matured into adjectives such as" is Greenfieldian for "has become." "Tsunami" is pseudo-sophistication, a sort of gimcrack brightness, like those people who say "smorgasbord" for "variety." Insofar as the word makes any sense at all, that sense is wrong: the writer does not mean to say that the effect of home computers on our lives has been sudden, violent and destructive.
(...)
Popularisation need not and should not be patronising.
(...)
Civilisation was popular, and something of the same kind could be popular again now, for there is in the land a hunger to be more serious. The hungry sheep look up, and it is time for them to be fed; why, there might even be money in it.
Read on from Prospect magazine
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