mandarine

(cross-posted at absidea)

Prelude

Politically, I am on the liberal side (possibly as liberal as they make them in France, but not brave/foolish enough to hope a revolution could help things out). Note for French readers: ‘liberal’ means rather the contrary of ‘libéral’.

But linguistically, I am a conservative prick. I do not often rant in public, but allow me to do so here:

• I hate it when people invent new words for old words they did not even bother to learn, and then think they are smart;
• I loathe jargon and acronyms that make it into general language;
• I shudder at spelling mistakes or inadequate punctuation in widely distributed papers and magazines or even books;
• I am ill-at-ease when people I know can’t spell two words right are speaking to me, because I am convinced they are making those spelling mistakes even as they speak;
• I detest it when grammar mistakes travel by way of radio waves from the mouth of an illiterate journalist to the minds of could-have-been-literate-but-too-late-for-that-now listeners;
• I dislike it when people say that language has to evolve, that it’s natural that it should do so, that it must adapt to the new times;
• I would be sorry to learn that people in a hundred years from now have to have Molière or Voltaire translated into new French. It is already enough that we have to have Montaigne and Rabelais adapted now;
• I would kill the guy who invented leet speak (but I keep a cool head and hope this is just a fad).

Let me justify myself: I am convinced that spoken language has a right to change, and that there is no freezing it. But I am also convinced that written language and official speech (as in TV or radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, books, blogs) must not follow the fashion. Otherwise, it is our literary legacy, the very memory of our culture which goes down the drain as we forget how to speak the language of our forebears and otherwise illustrious predecessors.

Written Icelandic language has changed so little that people can still read viking sagas from the 11th century. Does this make Icelanders more archaic? I do not think so.

What can we express today with modern English that Shakespeare could not? What nuances and accuracy of description do we have access to now with modern French that Villon (or even Ovid) did not?

What is at stake is the ability to communicate with the past (a one-way communication, but better than nothing), so that we are not a bunch of oblivious gnus going about our little businesses but we are part of a history. This is what George Orwell so accurately described in 1984: to force oblivion (and to channel thought), Big Brother had invented Newspeak.

Unfortunately, Newspeak is being made right now because we fail to learn and transmit language with all its depth and breadth; while we mine what little is left with bad spelling and bad grammar.

Blame it on the media

Then I point an accusing finger: I say that the collective carelessness of journalists is what causes all the ills of contemporary language and is turning everybody into illiterate savages. I would not have said that a hundred years ago when teachers and priests were the guardians of the country’s language. But now teachers are no match against the big media in terms of authority and broadcasting time; priests are gone; and classics cannot compete with magazines and other hastily-published prose. With their large audience, under-read mainstream journalists distribute bad spelling and grammar, improper words and unhappy neologisms as if it was the Holy Gospel.

There is hardly anyone left in France who knows that ‘après que’ is not followed by subjunctive mood. There is hardly anybody left across the Atlantic who knows what subjunctive mood is.

A digression

What are we to do? We cannot sentence nine in ten journalists to forced (linguistic) labour in Cayenne. We could try to re-educate them, but some might argue that it is too late for that and we cannot change behaviours overnight on such a large scale. Yet, we have seen miracles in the not-so-distant past on other subjects, and I gather we might reproduce such a miracle here.

The miracle I am referring to is what speed cameras did to French driving habits over the past five years. If there is one thing former President Chirac should be hailed for (apart from not going to Irak), it is the drastic reduction of the death toll on French roads. Before 2001, there were 8,000 deaths each year (that’s two and a half 9/11 attacks each year). In 2006, the yearly death toll was below 5,000. Between 2001 and 2007, more than 11,000 people did not die (maybe I am one of them), because the driving habits have adapted to speed cameras. Ruthless repression has succeeded where decades of weak calls to civic behaviour and drivers’ responsibility had miserably failed. End of digression.

The idea: a distributed language stasi

Whenever an official communication channel (TV, radio, newspaper, theater, political speaker, book, magazine, administration, anything that has some authority to the eyes of the public) makes a linguistic mistake, they would be fined for it. In order to avoid the complexity of a big state-run censorship department having to check everything, it would be up to the general public to detect and report mistakes. There would need to be a few experts for litigious mistakes, but I am sure that a wikipedia-like distributed organization of ordinary citizens could do the job quite well. Once a mistake is validated, the orgnization from which the mistake originated is fined (the broadcasting company, or the editor, or the ministry, whomever we can lay our hands on).

The key element in this process is that half the financial benefits from the fines go to the people who reported the mistakes. Citizens therefore act as automatic language cameras.

But it does not stop here. Soon enough, the big media companies will see that they are losing a lot of money. And the amateur censors will gradually make a real living from reporting language sins (by the way, this would give new credits to literary-type skills). I am quite convinced that they can find some sort of understanding, and that the successful censors will be offered official positions as correctors or personal language coaches inside the big companies. In the end, there will be fewer stray mistakes, and language will straighten itself up.

Who wants to sign the petition?

If you want more language ranting, I warmly recommend Tim’s Mother Tongue Annoyances blog

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