Friday, February 18, 2005
Purity in Language
Instantaneous conversion is a rare phenomenon. This fact is not remarkable; after all, one's attitudes and beliefs are the product of a myriad different influences which make their effect felt over the course of a lifetime. No single newspaper column, magazine article or television program is likely to outweigh the cumulative impact of years of interaction with friends and family, conversations with classmates
and colleagues, events experienced and ideas shared, books read and places visited.
All the more noteworthy, then, when you read an essay which suddenly and dramatically overturns a conviction which you've long held. This happened to me a few years ago. As most people who know me know by now, I'm a linguistic conservative. I value precision, and abhor sloppy usage; by the same token, I can't stand jargon, and I hate dictionaries that include 'secondary' meanings (born of misuse) on descriptivist grounds. I enjoy discovering and using the occasional neologism, but tend to resist 'cute' coinages. I dislike changes to the language that arise from a desire to be politically correct. And I believe that history and tradition are valid reasons to favour one style of writing over another.
But then I read Douglas Hofstadter's remarkable essay "A Person Paper on Purity in Language". While I still hold to many of the views expressed above, on one fairly significant point my stance has completely reversed itself; indeed, I'm willing to countenance sloppiness, awkwardness and much else, to overturn one particular (historical) aspect of the English language. The credit for this goes entirely to the essay, which, without any further preamble, I encourage all of you to read. Here.
and colleagues, events experienced and ideas shared, books read and places visited.
All the more noteworthy, then, when you read an essay which suddenly and dramatically overturns a conviction which you've long held. This happened to me a few years ago. As most people who know me know by now, I'm a linguistic conservative. I value precision, and abhor sloppy usage; by the same token, I can't stand jargon, and I hate dictionaries that include 'secondary' meanings (born of misuse) on descriptivist grounds. I enjoy discovering and using the occasional neologism, but tend to resist 'cute' coinages. I dislike changes to the language that arise from a desire to be politically correct. And I believe that history and tradition are valid reasons to favour one style of writing over another.
But then I read Douglas Hofstadter's remarkable essay "A Person Paper on Purity in Language". While I still hold to many of the views expressed above, on one fairly significant point my stance has completely reversed itself; indeed, I'm willing to countenance sloppiness, awkwardness and much else, to overturn one particular (historical) aspect of the English language. The credit for this goes entirely to the essay, which, without any further preamble, I encourage all of you to read. Here.
