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

I am slowly but steadily becoming addicted to audiobooks. In the meantime, the supply of free, public domain or otherwise copyleft audiobooks is skyrocketing, and this certainly fuels my addiction beyond the reasonable.

In the recent weeks, I have been ‘reading’ (all from www.Librivox.org):

• Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter
• A Tales of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (that one at LoudLit.org)
• Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingt Jours, by Jules Verne
• A truckload of short stories

As I was lying awake in the dark earlier tonight around midnight, [more]

Let’s face the bare truth: I did not enjoy reading Mrs Dalloway as much as I had hoped I would. It was my third attempt at reading something by Virginia Woolf, after two miserable failures with Jacob’s Room and Night and Day. This time, I had sworn to myself I’d finish the book, all the more so as it was recommended by Dorothy, Litlove, Kate and Bloglily.

Once again, I immediately felt drawn by Woolf’s prose: it feels like one of those crystal-clad chandeliers that send sparks and rainbows in all directions. But once again, the structure of the writing was too much for me.
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I have just finished ‘reading’ Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in three days, by way of an mp3 audio-book freely dowloaded from loudlit.org. I reckon I enjoyed it mightily good, I did. I was a little bothered at first with the southerner accent the narrator chose to use, and with the way he made the runaway slave Jim sound a bit like Jar-Jar Binks. But by and by I got used to it, and although I still suspect those accents were somewhat fake (like Glenn Close’s and Liv Tyler’s in Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune — which is one of my most favouritest movies), they blended in the landscape and contributed to the whole atmosphere. I am generally not a fan of linear scenarios, but in this case, the linear narration was perfectly suited to the linear flow of the Mississippi river.

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Commenting a recent article where I wrote about treating people more like animals (i.e. as irrational beings), Emily pointed out the fact that too many people believe animals have no feelings. If you are one of these people, please stick with treating people like people.

Why is it that humans often believe animals have no feelings? Are we stupid enough that we apply the same reasoning in this domain as when we were kids and believed spiders did not mind having their legs plucked because we did not hear them scream? Probably. Just because a cat cannot moan does not mean it feels no pain when it is sick. Just because a dog does not sob all day in the couch, looking blankly at the TV set and using up two full boxes of tissues does not mean it does not feel depressed. Just because a cow cannot say ‘I violently object to having my newborn taken away so that you can continue to milk me!’ does not mean she is indifferent to being separated from her calf.

As a matter of fact, I believe exactly the contrary. [more]

Emily was recently mentioning her passion for pens, and I confessed to being quite a pen lover myself, but whined about how seldom I now use one, as keyboards and screens gradually spoliate pen and paper.

And I had an idea: although I know I would not change keyboard for pen while editing, I also know that I still like writing down the final manuscript patiently, as a remembrance of when I wrote letters. Fellow bloggers have recently set a foot in the podcasting world. Maybe I won’t. But I can start a pencasting fad. It is quite suited to literate blogs, and much more bandwidth-sober than podcasting.
So here is my first pencast, the handwritten version of my latest post, entitled standing on the shoulders of giants.

I work in the aerospace industry. A domain where the best happened between 1950 and 1980. Mainly for bad reasons, among which an ambition to send a hydrogen bomb through or above the atmosphere over to the other side of the world was probably chief, the best scientists and engineers ever to work together did Sputnik, the SR-70, the Apollo programme, the Pioneer probes, the Jumbo Jet, the space shuttle, the Soyuz and Energiya launchers, the Buran space plane, the Concorde, the Airbus.

Nowadays, [more]

Dorothy and Quilhill managed to make me one of their slaves. Apparently, to be a member of this sect, you have to vote for a book, read it, and then comment on it. The last read was Jane Austen’s Lady Susan. Here is what I have to say about it. Warning — spoilers ahead.
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I have started reading Three Men in a Boat, enjoying it much more now than when I was ten. Adults often think that just because you can read and understand the words in a classic, you’ll understand and like the book — I think of Huckleberry Finn, of Le Grand Meaulnes, of Romeo and Juliet, of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea… Force one of the ‘easy’ classics onto the knees of your young readers and more often than not, you’ll know your defeat. Fortunately, everyone has a second chance — here ends my digression.
I was enjoying the wit and the story, when a short passage plucked my romantic fiber with Shakespearean acuity:

Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen’s plaintive cry and the harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the dying day breathes out her last.

From the dim woods on either bank, Night’s ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rear-guard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in stillness.

But then it goes back to normal:

Harris said:
“How about when it rained?”
You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris - no wild yearning for the unattainable.
[…]
Rainwater is the chief article of diet at supper. The bread is two-thirds rainwater, the beefsteak-pie is exceedingly rich in it, and the jam, and the butter, and the salt, and the coffee have all combined with it to make soup.

I am going to love this book.

Today, I finished reading all of Emily’s Telecommuter Talk. Ever since I found her blog, I knew I would have to read all of it sooner or later. Here is why: when Emily writes about something, anything at all really, she writes a story. Emily’s blog is not a journal: it is a collection of short stories. You won’t ever find a Telecommuter Talk entry like: ‘Today I hurt my little finger in a door’, no. Instead you will find a small drama about impossible love between doors and fingers, where knobs and hinges are characters with a personality of their own, where creaking door memories meet creaking joints fears. A story strewn with gems of psychology insight, peculiar personal philosophy, or obsessive-compulsive views. A story embroidered on a marvellous fabric woven from skillful language and dyed with colorful wit. I do not know if she’s real of if she’s just a storybook character invented by a skillful writer (maybe Hobs and Dorothy can testify in this respect), but I can tell you the skillful writer has me gripped.
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