I’ll be honest with you. I am a technological dinosaur inhabiting a young man’s body. I have a Facebook account because someone made one for me. I have a blog because someone taught me how to make one. I have never owned a Blackberry/iPhone/iPod. I don’t have text messaging on my phone. And I don’t Twitter. I use my computer primarily as a word processor. I use the internet primarily to look things up, communicate with friends, get the weather, and the news – all things that people used to do with books or forms of written information.
I like the internet and the various other technologies. I appreciate the convenience it has brought to the tasks above. But it worries me sometimes. Do you ever get a link from someone to a “really interesting article,” see that it is three “pages” long, and think “too long!”-? Have you seen the thing on Facebook where you don’t have to go to all the trouble of typing “I like this” – you just click and a little thumbs up sign attaches to something that says “So-and-so likes this?” Do you spell words correctly when you text? Use acronyms? ROTFL anyone?
I worry – because of George Orwell. I read “1984” when I was a junior in high school, and was haunted by it. But one passage in particular has stuck with me. It’s close to the beginning. The main character, Winston (whose job is to revise history) meets a colleague whose job is to revise language. His colleague describes how to manipulate language to great effect:
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words? A word contains its opposite in itself.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly
one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.
The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will
be no thought, as we understand it now.”
I don’t think the internet, Twitter, and texting cause people to eliminate words
on purpose. I don’t think advertising or pop music or news agencies or (shudder) radio talk show hosts or (shudder, shudder) politicians or (goosebumps) pastors are eliminating words on purpose. But I do think that trying to communicate rapidly and effectively often forces people to aim for the lowest common denominator in language usage.
So – read any good epic poetry lately? Poets and novelists (like Mr. Orwell) tend to resist this trend of lowest common denominator language. Their aim is still to communicate effectively – just not as rapidly. Great poets in particular have a habit of
creating new words to express ideas. Shakespeare either invented entirely, adapted, or brought over from other languages English words and phrases like: majestic, compromise (as a verb), elbow room, zany, “it’s Greek to me,” good riddance, “household words.” John Milton created or adapted: terrific, pandemonium, padlock, sensuous, archfiend, the concept of “outer space.”
But when was the last time you read Shakespeare or Milton? Have our brains atrophied too much to appreciate them? Has the ability to look up information instantaneously dulled us to the work of absorbing things that are beautiful, but not informational? Has doing so narrowed our “range of consciousness?” In our age of instant information, have we gained thousands of tidbits of arcane knowledge, but lost the knowledge of things that past generations learned through dedicated time? Things like Shakespeare, mythology, ancient history – the Bible?
I’m not saying extended treatises are better in and of themselves. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” as someone once said.* "Refrain from obfuscation," I always say.** I’m just saying – it might be good to read something that forces us to expand, rather than narrow, how we express what we mean.
*It was Shakespeare – in
Hamlet.
** No, I don't.
