Getting Better Words

Getting Better Words February 24, 2017

A_Christmas_Carol_-_Ignorance_and_Want_optPart of teaching gifted and talented students over the last thirty years (!) has been making observations. Here is one: students get the main point of a chapter, but often do not know the meanings of most of the words. Try this experiment yourself. Read the following from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children;
wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt
down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

Now ask: Why wretched? Why abject? Why frightful? Why hideous? Why miserable?

Eschew the old joke that Dickens got paid by the word. He did not. He was paid by “episode” of his novels and he often wrote for his own magazines as the star! This master of the English language was saying something about “ignorance” and “want.” These words are similar, but they do not mean the same thing.

The wretched need not be frightful. I have been wretched when hitting the bottom, but was not frightful. These two children were. Ignorance and Want are hideous, miserable, abject, and frightful. Yes, frightful can mean simply hideous, but it also has a sense of being fearful. I was abject, but never fearful.

Read slowly. Savor the words. I once asked a group of students to read Canto III of Inferno aloud. They did splendidly when I asked them what the Canto meant generally, but they could not exegete a line. They had been taught by very good students to read for meaning and they could, but they could not read for subtlety.

Is it any wonder our politics are so polarized?

I sometimes ask my students to read a Victorian newspaper aloud. They struggle The sentence structure is more complex than they are used to handling. Doubt we have changed? Read early Sports Illustrated and recent Sports Illustrated. You cannot say everything in a Noun-Verb-Object sentence.

A fearful result of our inability to catch nuance, or even use nuanced language, is a growth of tribalism. Signal to me that you are my team and I get your meaning, except I may be saying something more subtle. My guess is that most of us can catch the plot of a Dickens novel, but few can use the words.

What is the result of a limited vocabulary? We cannot do the subtle, hard work required of adults, because we lack the words to distance ourselves from the “feels.” Too many of us have highly elaborate vocabularies for our jobs (doctors, lawyers, plumbers, mothers), but simplistic words for our lives. The human things require the same detail that the sciences demand.

We need Shakespeare’s range when facing Hamlet’s problems. Doubt the problem? Try talking to an atheist engineer about truth, beauty, and goodness! One ends up with seventh grade vocabulary for humane letters and highly nuanced discussions of science. This explains much.

Of course, this disease impacts us all, atheists and Christians. We have been taught to read quickly, get the gist, and never to “waste time” lingering on the distinctions of a list of adjectives: wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. We are credentialed by our online diploma mills, but we are ignorant and so we want a better language.

I fear most of us no longer speak English outside of our jobs. We speak in pictograms.

God save us.

———————-

Based on a lecture to the College at The Saint Constantine School.

 


Browse Our Archives