A Response

Fear not, loyal readers. This rebuttal promises to be, if nothing else, refreshingly simple. You won't be forced to trudge through sentences weighed down with words like "chrestomathy", "heretofore", "tectonic" and "fungible". Words like these are used to impress the reader, rather than inform him. They are written to inject a sense of superiority, instead of clarity. In the end, tragically, the words get in the way, as they did here, and as a result some very clever arguments are overshadowed. Allow me one piece of gratuitous advice before I address the issue. My dear misguided fellow, instead of following in the self-indulgent footsteps of Mencken, follow another's path. Might I suggest Orwell, who had such a firm mastery of the English language that his writing is above all else, accessible and straight to the point. You can start by following one of his Six Rules on Writing: "never use a long word where a short one will do."

Enough about that. Our disagreement, I think we can both agree, lies mainly in our views of progress, and partly in change itself. Allow me to clarify my own position first. Nowhere in my piece did I argue against ALL change or progress, nor did I lament that we no longer speak Brythonic or Latin. [In fact, as I wrote, "I’m...pointing out that language changes, and I believe not always for the better."] You'll notice the absence of an absolute in that sentence. Yet somehow, I was labeled as being resistant to any form of change, even the most basic evolution of a language. But we expect this laziness from a writer who accused me of being too "abstract" and yet also of "narrow vision" in the same blog. In the future, let's stay away from the extremes of absolute statements, where progress must be either all good or all bad, because little gets done there. We both understand that language, like technology and society itself, changes out of necessity over time. My point was [and still is] that far too often, this progress brings about a cheapening of the language, the death of a once powerful word. Allow me to cede the floor to Ernest Hemingway for a second, who makes my point much more succinctly than I ever could. [If I was employing my opponent's style, I perhaps would have said that Hemingway said it more compendiously than I ever could. It means the same thing, but it lets you know how smart I am, and forces you to look it up]. As Hemingway wrote in Death in the Afternoon, "... all our words from loose using have lost their edge." This is the sort of progress I see [and apparently so does Hemingway]; a language full of words, once sharp and vibrant, now dull.

Let me stand on the shoulders of another literary giant. One who does not require a paragraph of introduction. George Orwell, as he wrote in the New England Weekly, was aware that change was not always for the better. He writes [in reference to the declining art of the novel]:

"The degradation that must follow is obvious. Look for instance at the fourpenny novelettes that you see piled up on any cheap stationer's counter. These things are the decadent offspring of the novel, bearing the same relation to Manon Lescaut and David Copperfield as the lap-dog bears to the wolf. It is quite likely that before long the average novel will not be much different than the fourpenny novelette..."

And so I ask, what has the 'sunlight of progress' illuminated for us? Where have our Capotes and Steinbecks and Hemingways gone? Our Frosts, Nerudas? Why are our newspapers floundering, bordering on unreadable and irrelevant, and in their places people like Hannity and O'Reilly and Olberman claim to report news when it is in fact entertainment and opinion? Why do more people recognize Britney Spears and Simon Cowell than Cormac McCarthy [or even your beloved Mencken]? Why is the novel worse off now than when Orwell wrote, and modern poetry all but forgotten? Where are these benefits of change? Is our language increasingly flexible, or increasingly misused? Does anyone speak with the same passion as Samuel Johnson and Daniel Webster did? [I seem to remember my opponent writing a blog on Mr. Webster, where he quoted a portion of a speech Webster had made. The main point of the piece, or one of them at least, was that it is a shame nobody talks like that anymore, especially in politics.]

But, according to those who blindly promote the banner of progress, "these are societal changes we must not lament as each of our parents did, but must adapt to.” Yes! We should lie down and let the waves of change wash over us, embracing the erosion that naturally follows. Eventually, we'll learn to accept and "adapt" to this deterioration of literature and the language that fills it, and it will be comfortable to settle for books that are written to pass time, rather than say anything. It will become easier, as we learn to adapt, to force bad writing down our throats, to forget the struggle that is worthwhile writing, and to eventually relegate it to the past.

Let’s talk about Herman Melville, another giant of literature who needs no introduction. Actually, I'll let Orwell talk about Melville. [Taken from The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1].

"Later, when industrialism was tightening its grip, something in Melville's spirit wilted with the times. The country was being debauched by 'progress', scoundrels were prospering, leisure and free thought were declining..."

And yes, it was Orwell, not me, who put progress in quotation marks. It seems he also understood the inherent irony attached with progress, like Freud did.

Freud once comically noted, “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”

Yes, what progress we have made.