Recently I reread The Man in the Iron Mask by Alaxandar Dumas. Most of the main charachters speak in a very flowery, elaborate and eloquent way. I have noticed this in other old books as well. I am wondering if people ever really talked like this. My friend said that aristocrats might have (but not all of Dumas’ main charachters are aristocrats). Does anyone know for sure? Is english de-evolving? This second question is just an aside.
I don’t know about the normal speech of people, but I do get the impression that people generally wrote in longer, more complex sentences. They made a point of this in Ken Burns’ PBS series The Civil War. The reminescences of even the foot soldiers that were published were surprisinly literate. Or read William Poundston’s chapter on The Beale Cipher in his book Biggest Secrets, where he discusses style. To see how wordy things could get, and to see a late 19th century reaction, read Mark Twain’s essay “James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”. Cooper wrote extremely long, complex sentences, which Twin humorously pared down to a more modern sensibility’s idea of size. Gibbon and Henry James wrote sentences stuffed with subordinate clauses that seemed to go on for pages.
No everyone wrote such florid prose, but it certainly seems to have been more common in the 19th century than today.
NO
Then as now there is a class in society that uses refined speech but the teeming masses have always been just as crude and just as poor at grammar as they are today.
As you noticed with Dumas in some times and places people came to expect their fiction to reflect a idealized version of speech. Shakespeare was probably the most extreme example of this. So one difference today is that we expect our fictional characters to speak pretty much the same way we do. I think it probably has something to do with egalitarianism.
And English is not de-evolving it is evolving as it always has and todays radical new usages will be tomorrows “correct” usages that the traditionalists will be trying to preserve.
Well, first of all, the fate of the English language has no bearing on the writings of M. Dumas, as he wrote in French. (Unless you are complaining about a specific translation, that is…)
The French written style is still today very elaborate. Read a transcript of a speach of Chirac (or even better, Mitterand!) and you’ll be surprised at the elaborate language.
It is worth remembering that Dumas was a very learned man, and what he wrote was not ‘realism’, but entertainment for the educated classes. Most writers today aim at a much more realistic depiction, but that hasn’t always been the goal.
For a taste of more down-to-earth 18th century French prose (and verse), I’d like to introduce that famous French poet, who spent most of his time in jail, or on parole, or drunk at the nearest tavern, until he was hanged at a relatively early age. But I cannot remember his name… For some reason I think ‘Buffon’, but that doesn’t quite seem right. Please, if someone know whom I’m thinking of, please, please let me know, as I’m slowly going nuts here…
Well, Shakespeare wrote so that dialog matched courtly speech, and so that it was intelligible by the wide range of people who packed the theaters. For example, I’ve heard it said that the wordplay punning duels which appear so frequently in the comedies were very popular in normal speech.
Apparently the Elizabethans were very sharp at picking up double entendre and punning. Notice that some of the Shakespeare interchanges seem to come at bullet speed. (I do have some question about this, because it seems to be possible to enjoy S. today, while missing the meaning of half the sentences.)
Also, I’ve heard it said that people formerly were very much more practiced at making up speeches or poems on the spot. My father, who spent some time as a British schoolboy, told me that the mark of a great debater was to be able to take any subject, any position, and make a short speech as though they were experts.
I’d like to think that today, eloquence is in part displaced by some other merits, but the main “improvements” in our speech that I can think of today are: 1) Quite a few people are bilingual, and 2) A typical person today can’t get by without knowing a bewildering range of technical terms and concepts. Imagine the number of words one needs to know just to use a computer! 200?
Balderdash! Shakespeare’s dialogue included every kind of speech, from the crudest grunting on up. His plays were popular entertainment, not meant only for the refined elite.
Also, Dumas, Dickens, and the like got paid by the word, so it was in their best interest to “pad” their language.
I was going through old Tomatometer reviews yesterday and found this gem from Gary Kamiya of (surprise!) Salon;
“Using the overpowering techniques of modern film, Steven Spielberg has cut through the glory-tinged gauze that shrouds World War II to reveal its brutal reality, creating a phenomenology of violence unsurpassed in the history of cinema.”
“Phenomenology”? It doesn’t even fit the sentence; as Fezzik put it, I don’t think that word means what Gary thinks it means. Note also the use of the word “cinema” where most mere mortals would say “movies.” There’s always been a class of folks who chose to use 30-word sentences containing $50 words.
But I think that class is smaller today. In general, I do believe language today is more clipped and functional. The Civil War series was particularly instructive in that regard; soldiers then wrote letters few people could write today. partly_warmer makes a good point about Shakespeare, which is very linguistically complex, and yet his plays were wildly popular, as well as the similarly literate plays of many others at the time.
Or consider the speeches of politicians. I challenge you to find a politician today who’s presented a speech even remotely as powerful as Winston Churchill’s best addresses. Churchill described occupied Europe as “…the Gestapo and all the other odious apparatus of Nazi rule.” Can you imagine a politician today using a term like “odious apparatus?” Do you think Ted Kennedy even knows what that means? George Bush gave a speech a seventh grader could have written and he was hailed as a visionary. My Prime Minister, Jean Chretien, is barely capable of coherent speech in EITHER official language.
RickJay, I give you your compatriot Robertson Davies, who wrote:
How can you but love that kind of prose? Such mastery of language is, as you point out, not very common today, but I refuse to acept that it is a dying art.
There are still politicians capable of giving eduacated speeches. Just look at anything by Mitterand (http://www.discours-mitterrand.org), for example. Let’s investigate the first sentence of his speech delivered on 18th May 1987:
And it goes on in a very flowery prose for quite a while! Don’t tell me it’s not eloquent!
Suffice it to say that the art of eloquence is not dead, although you are correct in pointing out that it is no longer as prevalent as it was in victorian times.
[sub]Yes I know that none of the examples I have given is very productive any more. But they were in the not to distant past.[/sub]
“Using the overpowering techniques of modern film, Steven Spielberg has cut through the glory-tinged gauze that shrouds World War II to reveal its brutal reality, creating a…formal description of awareness…of violence unsurpassed in the history of cinema.”
Of course, I’m not seeing it in context, but I don’t have a problem with it.
Show me where is says “refined elite” or any other similar idea in my statement about Shakespeare. What I said was:
This is undeniably true of Shakespeare. In his works even the “crudest grunting” as you put it is presented in an idealized and highly stylized way that no person could ever duplicate in conversation.
The question of the post was, could the poster assume that because fiction from another time used elaborate language as opposed to most fiction today could one infer that English was de-evolving. My Answer was no. I then used Shakespeare and Dumas as examples of authors who used elaborate language as a stylistic element common in their time. I hold by this statement.
I never said or implied that Shakespeare was elitist.
Some time after 9/11 I heard a Tony Blair speech. It was very eloquent, and I was impressed. I think there is less “eloquence” today with phrases such as “my bad,” etc.
Read any journal of early America, (I’m thinking of two I read by women, one who was a simple farmer’s wife kidnapped by Indians and another that was a first mate’s wife and her husband was at sea - unfortunately, it was a few years ago when I read them and can’t remember the authors) and you will find that they are well written. I would be willing to bet that they were well spoken too.
We should remember that it was a time when recreation included reading, conversing and writing and there were no televisions, radios, video games, DVDs and VCRs to distract from attempting to communicate.
I am also led to believe that the very literate were treated like the rock stars or pro jocks of their times and being so, people would attempt to emulate them and speak and write better.
This is in complete contrast to today where young people (and not so young for that matter) attempt to be more “street” and if they aren’t talkingly like a rapper who brags about dropping out of junior high school, they are trying to speak like a professional athlete who amazes when he forms a sentence. This even carries over to politicians. Listen to our current President the next time he speaks.
Widespread literacy is still a relatively recent development. Written documents from the past tend to come from an elite, highly literate upper class and do not accurately represent the speech patterns of common people.
There’s still a bit of a misconception about those Civil War letters. Sure many letters were eloquent and complex particularly those sent by officers. However, letters that appear to be written by common foot soldiers were often written by a paid scribe. The scribe was usually just another ordinary soldier who happened to be literate. He would compose a letter - not a transcription usually - but general news and flowery prose that expressed the thoughts communicated to him by the paying soldier.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember where I read this. There was some discussion in print about this subject shortly after Ken Burns’ documentary was released. If anyone remembers where, I’d appreciate a cite.
My only guess is Francois Villon. Of course, he lived in the 15th century, not the 18th. Beats me.
So why does Robertson Davies even write? “tenebrous and rebarbative” means “murky and repellent”. He seems to be saying that he writes not to communicate meaning, but to mentally masturbate. Fine. I also like long and unusual words, but preferring prose not to be deliberately hard to make sense of does not make a reader “intellectually stunted”.
I’m reminded of a line from the movie Dangerous Liaisons: “Like most intellectuals he’s intensely stupid.” (That may not be an exact quote.)
Excesssive complexity in non-fiction writing is a sign of bad style, in my view. There can be no such rules for fiction, however. To take an example, at one point in Henry Green’s Party Going a character is lost in a thick fog:
Now this is certainly a complicated sentence which most people will need to read a few times, but it is not mere mental masturbation. The reader’s confusion is supposed to mirror that of the woman in the fog.
I think that the degeneration of speech in common usage may have started a tad more recently than I originally thought.
I was sitting around a few days ago, watching “Leave it to Beaver”; it was the episode where Wally becomes a Boy Scout and goes on a camping trip, leaving the Beaver to his own devices, etc. I noticed that the way that both the parents pronounced the words"boy scout" as a compound word/phrase was different than todays usage that I am accustomed to in that they stressed the word “scout”, i.e. “boy SCOUT”, rather than the way I have usually heard it, pronounced as “BOY scout”. The first version does seem more grammatically correct in that they are refering to scouts that just happen to be boys, emphasizing the important bit, that they are indeed scouts. This example can be combined with others that contain even, shall we say, less worry about grammar with emphasis on entertainment from only slightly earlier on in time. On the Three Stooges re-runs, you will see common references to “serviettes”(napkins), as well as the pronunciation of words such as “again” with a longer “A”. This is nowadays recognized by Americans as British (or Canadian) English , who are generally considered to be more grammatically precise in the English language than their Yankee counterparts. My humble opinion is that, as far as these limited examples allow, this “decline” in American English accelerated with the acceptance and celebration by certain gentries of the oft glamorized and misinterpreted “Urban Lifestyle”. AFAIK, this speech movement could have started its acceleration as late as the early 70s.
Me fail English? That’s unpossible!
Ahh, Thank you Baldwin! You have saved my last vestige of sanity!
Somehow I had got my cronology mixed up. I promise it will happen again. 