Fr Hawtin has been indisposed recently—as has his wife Charlotte. They would both appreciate your thoughts and prayers. Meanwhile, the Rector has chosen one of his favorite essays as this week’s offering.
The greatest enemy of literacy today is not the graphic sex, foul language, and gratuitous violence that feature increasingly in the television programs and movies we watch and the books we read.
Certainly, prolonged heavy breathing, four–letter words, and the sound of pounded flesh do nothing to improve literacy—or advance the plot for that matter. But they are merely symptoms, not the disease.
The real enemy of literacy, I would contend, is “Spellcheck”—the computer program that enables us to check our spelling in an e–mail or college essay at the touch of a button. Just as the pocket calculator has diminished the average person’s ability to perform simple mathematical calculations, so Spellcheck is responsible for shrinking their command of the language.
Spellcheck, you see, does away with our need to learn to spell, and this, in turn, eliminates our need for dictionaries. And dictionaries were the tool that people used to increase their vocabularies.
Thirty years ago, for example, a popular feature in The Reader’s Digest was: “It pays to increase your word power.” Radio stations, moreover, earned a sizable chunk of revenue from advertisers offering surefire methods of improving one’s ability to speak eloquently and persuasively by increasing one’s vocabulary.
Today The Reader’s Digest’s circulation is in steep decline, while the folks who sell vocabulary enhancing books and tapes no longer seem to find it advantageous to advertise on the radio. Today’s Americans don’t seem much interested in articulacy or eloquence.
This declining interest in articulacy has not been without consequences. It is probably the factor most responsible for the coarsening of our culture. William of Wykeham—founder of Winchester College, the great English school, and New College, Oxford—rightly observed that “manners maketh man,” but he might equally have added the corollary: “Language maketh manners.”
Forty years ago, President Richard Nixon was hideously embarrassed by the content of tape recordings of his discussions with aides in the Oval Office. The transcriptions made public were peppered with the
words “expletive deleted.”
What embarrassed Nixon beyond measure was not so much the subject he was discussing, but the obscene and vulgar language he used to express his views.
It was language utterly incompatible with the dignity of the Oval Office. It was language that appalled the bulk of the electorate. And it was language that he would never have dreamed of using in front of his family and friends. But then, Nixon, in normal circumstances, was a mannerly and courteous man.
Today, obscenities that would have made Nixon and his aides blush are the currency of everyday speech. Lewdities, once confined to the barrack square and the ship’s forecastle, color the speech not just of the “Great Unwashed” but what was once called “Polite Society.”
This casual everyday use the ugliest expletives by the gamut of people from dock workers and drivers to talk show hosts , from shop assistants to movie stars, has totally devalued the epithet. When all speech is obscene, how can one tell when one’s being insulted?
My father was certainly not prudish and prissy, but he despised folks who swore continually and routinely dished out obscene insults. It was, he claimed, the sign of a limited vocabulary.
This did not mean father was incapable of expressing his displeasure. He was, in fact, the master of the elegant epithet or, if you prefer, the eloquent insult, including such locutions as “addle–pated clowns,” “maggoty headed monsters,” or “lily–livered loons.” His response to rudeness was “churlish dolt,” “urchin–snouted dog wart,” “prating clotpole” or “ill–bred bum–baily.” Uncalled for tears were shed by “mewling brats,” “whining toads,” or “sniveling scantlings.”
This is but a mere sample of the epithets at his disposal. Indeed, I remember my brother and I watching him give a rowdy soccer fan a voluble dressing down—lasting a good five minutes—during which he did not once repeat himself. The unfortunate recipient’s response? An admiring: “Blimey, Guv.”
Father was by no means unique in this ability. Most people with a decent education and a mildly extrovert personality—especially schoolmasters—were equally expert in the realm of amusing eloquent insults.
It was, you see, a product of their education. They didn’t learn much about sex or global warming, but they were very well versed in geography, mathematics, and foreign languages, not least Latin and French—both wonderful sources of epithets and insulting epigrams.
But the primary source of their store of insults came from the study of English literature and religion—notably William Shakespeare and the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible.
That they mined Shakespeare, probably comes as no great surprise, but the King James Bible? How about “whited sepulchers” and “blind guides” for starters?
Youngsters back then were rarely subject to “time outs” and similar modern disciplinary measures devised to avoid harming children’s self esteem. But then, back then, folks believed that self–esteem—like the esteem of society at large—had to be earned.
Eloquent dressings down were certainly not intended to enhance the self–esteem of the recipients, but to tell them to shape up. For youngsters, however, the colorful language softened the blow—and it gave us some fascinating words to look up in our dictionaries. GPH✠
Newsletter