I tend to agree with [partly warmer’s suggestion concerning today’s access to various media as a manner of expressing oneself being wider than in ages past.
This may be completely ignorant on my part, but is it possible that our society is more open and diverse today that it was before? There is no single ideal of “culture” and education. There is no one “society” or upper class to aspire to.
For example, one could be extremely knowledgeable about and successful in a technical field. Even if he knew little about art or literature, he would not be considered the social inferior of one who did.
I have a rather large vocabulary, and am somewhat frequently surprised to find people I consider “educated” unfamiliar with terms I use. I don’t try to put on airs, just to use the most appropriate word for the setting. I recall a lawyer down the street being almost indignant when I described a movie as “soporific.” Heck, I picked that one up from Beatrix Potter! And I simply did not know of a better word for describing someting as “sleep-inducing.”
I think I got my vocab from reading. And I do not think people read as much as before, nor do they all read the same things.
A couple of random thoughts, based my study of 19th century letters and diaries. People then tended to write for an audience. Your letter would likely be passed around by the whole family, read aloud, maybe even quoted to the neighbors. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has done some work showing that women often read each other’s diaries as a mark of friendship. Knowing that one has such a wide audience probably made one choose one’s words and topics carefully. That’s why the diary of the slave owner that DanielWithrow mentioned is so interesting. It’s one of the few diaries that historians have that was intended to be entirely private, and it’s hardly eloquent.
Also, in the letters and diaries I’ve read, there tend to be stock phrases that, though they sound eloquent to us, were used so often as to become cliches. One that comes to mind is “when we meet in that bright land where sorrow is no more,” i.e., Heaven. Although its a lovely phrase, it doesn’t actually express an original thought.
Others have also pointed out that we mostly have the writings and speeches of the elite. While plantation owners may have been more eloquent than Joe Six-Pack today, it’s harder to know how slaves and poor whites in the American South talked, for example. I doubt they were conversing on Dumas’s level.
I don’t know how long ago we’re referring to by “in the past,” but if it helps, my paternal grandparents were born in the late 1880s and they weren’t any more eloquent that ordinary people are today.
(bit of a hijack)
Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves To Death deals a bit with the question of oral/visual culture. As I remember, he claims that Westerner’s ability to understand and follow complex argument- in both verbal and written form- has markedly decreased in the past 200 or so years, due to a cultural shift that emphasizes short, easily disgestible facts over rhetoric and debate.
I think one of his examples was the length of the original Lincoln/Douglas debates, which I believe was over 7 hours long (?), verbally complex. I believe most political debates now are much shorter. Anyway, it’s an interesting book.
One of my favourite stories about my favourite author, G.K. Chesterton, is about a debate. He arrived at the venue, probably not on time, but his opponent entirely failed to show up. Rather than cancel the debate, he took the stage, and argued brilliantly for his side, and then proceeded to argue just as brilliantly for the opposing one.
(bit of a hijack)
Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves To Death deals a bit with the question of oral/visual culture. As I remember, he claims that Westerner’s ability to understand and follow complex argument- in both verbal and written form- has markedly decreased in the past 200 or so years, due to a cultural shift that emphasizes short, easily disgestible facts over rhetoric and debate.
I think one of his examples was the length of the original Lincoln/Douglas debates, which I believe was over 7 hours long (?), verbally complex. I believe most political debates now are much shorter. Anyway, it’s an interesting book.
One of my favourite stories about my favourite author, G.K. Chesterton, is about a debate. He arrived at the venue, probably not on time, but his opponent entirely failed to show up. Rather than cancel the debate, he took the stage, and argued brilliantly for his side, and then proceeded to argue just as brilliantly for the opposing one.
Good rap is as much about rhythm as rhymes, and using unusual rhymes or near-rhymes that seem to break the pattern but in fact transition into other verbal riffs…very interesting stuff.
Seeing it written as it usually is on lyric pages doesn’t capture the music of it.
One of my favorites is ‘Down for Whatever’ by Ice Cube. It’s funny on a few levels, it’s got an interesting laid-back rhythm that makes it stick in your head, and…hell, just listen to it.
PLDennison raises some strong points, whereas Mornea simply nominates my last comment as the most ignorant of the week. If she is interested in elaborating on her reason for this nomination, I solicit her comments; until then, I will move on with defending my observation on the state of American English today.
Chaucer would indeed have quite a time interpreting what ANY of us are writing on this forum. He’d be even MORE puzzled by the means that this forum is conveyed, but that’s not quite the subject. I wasn’t speaking to Chaucer, or any other citizen of his time. Therefore, I thought I would be reasonably understood. True, it is rather ironic that I state my opinion with all these grammatical errors, but the truth is that I am not writing a term paper that is graded on correct usage or even a magazine article on the subject. When I am on a forum, I tend to use a more conversational tone than would be expected in a more formal work, because there is just a bit of informality in here, isn’t there?(Please correct me if I am wrong.) I should also point out that my lack of typing skills helps to encourage grammatical errors. I also do not recall directly insulting or dissecting anyones’ grammar in this forum personally. Despite the sarcastic way you used to point out my errors and bad grammar, PLDennison (Come one, come all, etc.), I am glad you brought them up, as most of them I have either forgotten or didn’t know altogether. Thank you.
Captain Amazing, thanks for explaining the vaudevillian concept, I was not aware of it.
Lissla Lissar, that’s really something. I think I will check out that book.
On a positive note, I hope that PLDennison’s usage and vocabulary in his post is practiced by many, many others; If it is, the future of American English looks promising.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Lissla Lissar *
**(bit of a hijack)
Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves To Death deals a bit with the question of oral/visual culture. As I remember, he claims that Westerner’s ability to understand and follow complex argument- in both verbal and written form- has markedly decreased in the past 200 or so years, due to a cultural shift that emphasizes short, easily disgestible facts over rhetoric and debate.
I agree with this view. I think we can compare the writings of any period, since in every case the person who writes has to be literate, by definition. It follows that anyone who can write can also read, and therefore could be exposed to literature available in their time period. The fact that people who were literate read more, and therefore developed a wider vocabulary and a better mastery of the language evidences a decrease in vocuabulary and use of language by literate people in our age.
To summarize, literate people read less on average due to the availability of different forms of entertainment, and therefore have comparatevely poorer vocabularies and their use of language is worse than the one exhibited by literate people in previous ages.
Glad to have you back, pld, and to see that you’re in fine form, too. I was concerned after your recent Pit thread, and I used “search” to find you in this thread. Just to see that you were okay. See? Ya got friends here, bub!
Yeah, I know I started that first sentence with the implicit subject, “I,” followed a little later by a sentence fragment, and then “Ya got” for “You’ve got.” And another started with a conjunction (this one, in fact). Even though I complained in another thread that TV news anchors and others in the media were butchering the language (for which you took me to task, if I remember correctly).
Actually, one of my favorite writers is Robert Fulghum, who must be a grammarian’s nightmare, but is as eloquent as anyone writing today. See? I worked eloquence into this reply, so I haven’t completely hijacked the OP. So there!
Oh, and you did mean “learned snobbery,” didn’t you?
Literary writing almost never matches the vernacular in any era, it’s just a very clever imitation. You’ll see this if you compare any contemporary novel or play to a completely faithful transcript of spoken English, such as a courtroom record. Real dialogue is full of false starts, unfinished thoughts, stumbling, repetition, non sequiturs, and space-fillers; fictional dialogue, no matter how “realistic” it sounds on the stage, is a cleaned-up version. Anything else would be unbearably tedious.
Much of Shakespeare’s dialogue still sounds “natural” because he was a great artist. One of my favorite examples comes from Romeo and Juliet. Juliet’s father gives instructions to his servants in what seems like simple, unadorned English:
Most people who read or listen to these lines would perceive no particular literary artistry in them – but it’s there. The first printed edition of Romeo and Juliet was a “bad quarto” which may have been pirated by another actor in Shakespeare’s company; at any rate, someone other than Shakespeare evidently tried to reconstruct the play from memory. Thinking of Will Kempe, the actor who played the part of Peter, this author wrote:
One need only read both versions aloud to see how much polish Shakespeare put into even the simplest of throwaway lines.
I do not know if this really pertains to the OP, but recently I noticed that Brits use more – interesting – words than the average American. American English speakers seem to get the most mileage out of the fewest words. In terms of literature, it seems to me that contemporary writing reflects this, too - American writers “sound” American, casual and informal. Iambic pentameter aside, British writers still sound more formal and flowery. This makes me wonder if Brits in general place a higher value on the language.
(PS:Fretful Porpentine: Is your name taken from Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander?)
