Words from Obama's Libya speech.
Conflicted is a horrible borrowing into British English, deconstruct is a vacuous term, quantum is not understood and misapplied, doors are never alarmed, blogs sounds shitty, Shiites are actually Shias, quality time and me time are shoddy, selfish concepts, substantive is rather insubstantial and the focus group should be penned up in marketing, not left to roam free.
An academy could rule out the stupid and influential jargon of the half educated young invented on the bus on the way home from school. I'm going gym. They say. The young sods leave out to the.
An academy would have a riposte to the way advertising and PR corrupt language - and ruin good music - by association. Business also ruins good words and expressions. I used to quite like the words, google and googleplex, until a company with the same name spoiled them both. Now they aren’t even recognised by my spell checker without their capital Gs.
Certainly, the word Left co-opted by the centre right is a misusage.
An academy could warn us regularly about the danger of default US spell checkers and the encroachment of Mirriam Wesbster.
An academy could coin new words, as it does in France and re-mint them. Here's a word which should be included by an academy. It was coined by my father: inotic as the opposite of exotic.
If the academy regulated language it would have to work democratically and representatively, with force of expertise and argument. Let’s look at one example in more detail; the possible regulation of the usage of hoi polloi.
According to our resident grammarian, hoi polloi already includes the article. David Cameron might say. Hoi polloi were rioting and they are criminals not protesters. But he should not say: The hoi polloi were rioting.
Think of the meteorological phenomenon called - in English - El Nino. Now would you say: The El Nino started early this year. No you would not. Would you say: The la belle France. No you would not.
Now ignorance is an interesting argument for lexicalisation, but it is not convincing. The people who originally borrowed the term, probably understood how to use it in the original Greek, or they would not have been able to borrow it. Hoi polloi was not lexicalised as pidgin. Therefore, logically, hoi polloi should be lexicalised from the Greek without using an article in English.
Crossing paradigms to structural linguistics, watch your step, the borrowing hoi polloi only has a meaning syntagmatically in relation to other words. Semiologically, if you like - if you are literati.
Another factor is the Principle of Least Effort: the PLE. The phenomena whereby language is simplified. Conjugations are lost from English; subject pronouns dropped from Spanish; consonants from Arabic; word order from Russian, and so on and so on. Over time the meaning of hoi polloi will change. The dropping of the concords with the PLE.
The process of lexicalisation itself involves reflection. The choice whether to use a word or not. And this is the key and the justification for the formation of a British Academy of the English Language. Language can be regulated and acted upon consciously.
Words phrases and usages are subject to analysis and reformulation. If I say that Hoi Polloi includes the article, now it becomes a decision to wilfully ignore the etymology of the word.
If we all got together and decided not to say: 'I feel conflicted about this.' then it would indeed go away. There is a decision to make about whether to say the hoi polloi or not. Take the decision. The fact we can take a joint decision is the argument for doing it properly.
Now let's look at the arguments for laissez faire, letting the language be, and letting words arise 'democratically'. Ask yourself. Do they arise democratically? Clearly they don't. Those people who dominate, those groups who have power in our society have de facto control of the language.
Even the language of the street is not democratic. It is selectively made visible by corporate media. If there is no thoughtful, decisive intercession then the same people who choose what you will eat and wear and drive, will put new words and usages into your mouth together with your cornflakes.
Let us imagine you want to talk about Libya. You will describe Libyan 'rebels' 'liberating' Tripoli. People with the same ideas as some of those rebels have just blown up the British Council offices in Kabul. You can't talk about Libya without referring to the 'rebels'. If you call them Jihadists then you aren't playing the political game. Who controls British English?
Humpty Dumpty said, ''in rather a scornful tone, it [the word glory] means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less. The question is, said Alice, whether you can make words mean so many different things. The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master that is all.?'
The argument for having no body to regulate language is an argument for laissez faire. It is an argument for letting those who are masters of our public discourse keep their power....That is all.
It is extremely alienating and claustrophobic to be forced to use language dominated by the corporate media in order to communicate publically. Every word comes with its default usage, a hidden style guide entry. There are rebels, there are terrorists, and you may not use Marxist terminology without irony.
You may not redefine objects and things and theories and ideas because all of these uses are already conquered and colonised. Soon like water, language will be copyrighted and its uses restricted like software - mindware. They will charge us to use their manufactured words – which stink.
The question of what words we should and should not use is not a trivial one. Words are concepts. An argument for a state Academy of the English language is an argument for the regulation of English under common democratic representative ownership.
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