‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’
I remember a dialogue of years ago, when I returned to the office after a client meeting, and our chairman asked me to ‘appraise’ him.
“You’re an excellent businessman,” I offered. “What’s that supposed to mean?” “That’s me appraising you.” “How did the meeting go, is what I mean.” “Oh, so you mean ‘apprise’, not ‘appraise’.” “There’s no such word.” “Yes, there is,” I said, producing my trusted Chambers yet again. ‘I don’t care if the word is in the @£4$%&! dictionary,’ explained the chairman. He then proceeded to call me a pedant (true) and a snob (false).
This episode wouldn’t be worth recalling if it weren’t symptomatic of the collapse of our culture in general, and language specifically. I haven’t had the pleasure of learning proper grammar and usage at an English school, but the impression one gets is that neither have most people. My guess is that such things are simply not taught.
‘Language,’ one hears said so often, ‘is only a means of communication.’ That’s not strictly true: if it were nothing but that, we wouldn’t have Shakespeare’s sonnets to savour. But even so, no communication can be complete without the same word meaning the same thing to both speaker and listener. Otherwise there’s always the danger of the communication turning into Chinese whispers. Alas, our comprehensively educated people have been trained to share Humpty Dumpty’s belief that words mean whatever they want them to mean.
I used to think that the debacle of 1965, which eventually turned Britain’s education from being the envy of the world into its laughingstock, was simply an administrative oversight inspired by vague egalitarian longings. Now I’ve come round to the view that it was an act of conscious sabotage. Our spivocrats actually strive to make the people illiterate.
For it takes an illiterate populace not to realise that our politicians are capable of committing several rhetorical fallacies in one sentence – or to accept that their Robin Hood attempts to rob those who earn for the sake of those who don’t have something to do with ‘justice’ (Chambers: justice. the awarding of what is due).
Advocates of this linguistic mayhem insist this is par for the course, for language develops. The assumption is that any change is for the better, which is as manifestly false in linguistics as it is in politics.
Real development has over centuries turned English vocabulary into the largest of all European languages (twice as large as in Russian, for example). The post-1965 pseudo-developments, however, have had exactly the opposite effect on our language. In fact, apart from the four-letter words having entered the mainstream of discourse, English is getting smaller by the minute.
The warning signals are ringing throughout the English-speaking world. Kevin says ‘masterful’ when he means ‘masterly’ – beware! A good word is on its way to perdition. Jill is ‘disinterested’ in classical music – woe betide ‘uninterested’ (not to mention classical music). Gavin thinks ‘simplistic’ is a more elegant way of saying ‘simple’, ‘fulsome’ is a sophisticated version of ‘full’ or ‘naturalistic’ of ‘natural’ – English is coming down to a size where ignoramuses can handle it comfortably. Trish thinks ‘innocuous’ means ‘innocent’ – in a few years it will. And it’s not just words; whole grammatical categories bite the dust. Present Indefinite, where is your brother Subjunctive? Trampled underfoot by the education our spivocrats spawned.
Once words are deprived of their substance, spivocrats can perpetuate their power by enforcing the formal aspect of any word. That is precisely the impulse behind political correctness that has succeeded only because resistance to it was softened by our so-called education. A semi-literate population is a soft touch for spivocratic Humpty Dumpties insisting that words mean whatever they want them to mean. Who cares about nuances if a lexicon of 1,000 words is sufficient to get one through modern life? So when a dictate is issued that some stylistically neutral word is now taboo, people just shrug with equanimity. We can’t say Negro any longer? Fine, we’ll say black. You prefer Afro-American? yawns the New Yorker. Splendid. Afro-Caribbean? echoes the Londoner. Right you are, gov. Words don’t matter.
And in fact they don’t – as such. What does matter, however, is the spivocratic impetus behind the words, the Humpty-Dumpty power to enforce the arbitrary meaning at the expense of the real one. This matters because the united spivocrats of the world know that they assume a greater power every time they win a linguistic skirmish. Thus, when a New York public official is made to apologise in the press for having used the word ‘niggardly’, yet another triumphal chariot rolls through our modern world.
‘The head bone connected to the neck bone, the neck bone connected to the back bone, the back bone connected to the thigh bone…’ and so forth. If we were to deny the existence of any semantic aspect that’s more or less immutable, words would stop being a means of communication and become an instrument of power – or nothing.
They would be nothing if the speaker could not impose upon the listener the intended meaning of the word. They would be an instrument of power if he could. So do let’s mind our language, shall we?