Language is not a protocol legislated by an authority but rather a wiki that pools the contributions of millions of writers and speakers, who ceaselessly bend the language to their needs and who inexorably age, die, and get replaced by their children, who adapt the language in their turn.
Pinker, Steven. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. p. 3 (hardcover)
Author: Milan
In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford.
Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.
View all posts by Milan
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The Unfolding of Language
Prevailing winds
The “usage wars” are coming to an end, and good sense is winning
EVERY trade is also a tribe, and journalists are no exception. One way that tribes, from teens to programmers, signal membership of the group is through language. Hacks do the same. They write “hed” for headline, “lede” or “intro” for the first sentence in a story, “graf” for “paragraph”, “nut graf” for the core paragraph that gives the story’s main idea. The last line is always the “kicker”.
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In the main text, journalists tend to the opposite sin. Instead of being obscure, they make prose feel so drearily familiar that the reader wonders if the paper came out last month—or even last year. A satirical piece in the Washington Post covered the white-nationalist marches in Virginia as though written by a hack foreign correspondent, describing “tribal politics” and “flashpoints” in which the “Trump regime” sided with the “ethnic majority”. Good editors have a list of clichés that they strike from their pages with zeal. Only a journalist finds “fresh” a fresh synonym for “new”, so that the reader hears of “fresh clashes” or “fresh elections”, or in one grisly example, “fresh bodies” washing up weeks after a tsunami. Only in the papers do time periods “see” this or that: March saw major demonstrations, April saw fresh clashes, and so on.
Academic historians tend to be sniffy about all this. But though their own work may be unsullied by ingratiating ornament, it is also, often, untouched by readers. In one exemplary if extreme comparison, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s exhaustive biography of Thomas Cromwell sold a respectable 32,000 copies in Britain. Ms Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” trilogy, which also recounts Cromwell’s life, has sold 1.9m and counting. As Dan Jones, a popular writer of medieval history, says diplomatically,academic histories tend “not to have crisp readability at the top of their list of priorities”. More bluntly, he reckons that “most academic history is unreadable”.
“People like stories,” Mr Jones explains. What he calls “painful academic textbooks” may be “very useful” to specialists; but they are mostly not intended for a general readership. Academics themselves are beginning to see the problem. Two years ago, Hal Brands and Francis Gavin of Johns Hopkins University wrote an article titled “The Historical Profession is Committing Slow-Motion Suicide”. They lamented the lack of interest in “clear, intelligible prose”, decrying the moment when “academic historians began writing largely for themselves” while “populariser” became “a term of derision”.
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/06/10/the-trouble-with-the-past