Category: Readings

This essay is both interesting and deep. It starts with a very easy to read anecdote, details are very vivid: “always together, speaking Spanish”, “mysterious books”, “wrapped in brown shopping-bag paper” (this one appeared again later) and “closed firmly behind them”. Naturally I had the feeling when I finished the first paragraph: tell me more! Why do these details sound so mysterious? Also these words are those kind of details that a child would notice. I was attracted by this essay right away.

Later the author went to elementary school. On the first day, he saw his mother’s face “dissolve in a watery blur behind the pebbled-glass door”. After I read the whole essay and went back, I quickly realized that later, a similar scene with different emotions attached appeared. Finally after the anecdote, family background comes in. “A few neighbors would smile and wave at us. We waved back.” A short sentence creates a sense of silence. “Conveyed through those sounds was the pleasing, smoothing, consoling reminder that one was at home.” Adjectives in a row strengthen the feeling. “At six years of age, I knew just enough words for my mother to trust me on errands to stores one block away – but no more.” The “just” and “but no more” are used really good. The author talks about how he was a listening child. True. I can understand the feeling of being a sensitive kid. The author can even notice this kind of detail as a child as how “listeners would usually lower their heads to hear better what I was trying to say” (the detail reappeared later), and how the sound in their house changed when the door opened because English came in. He and his brothers and sisters were isolated to be outsiders of the American society because they could not speak fluent English. The author, thus, found the difference between public sound and private sound. Furthermore, public individuality and private individuality. The description of the classroom memory is really impressive: “‘Richard, stand up. Don’t look at the floor. Speak up. Speak to the entire class, not just to me!’ But I couldn’t believe English could be my language to use. (In part, i did not want to believe it.) I continued to mumble. I resisted the teacher’s demand. (Did I somehow suspect that once I learned this public language my family life would be changed?) Silent, waiting for the bell to sound, I remained dazed, different, afraid.” Like before, here three adjectives are used in a row. Language, or rather, sound and the author’s childhood memory are closely linked together in his mind.

From his own experiences and feelings, he disagrees with bilingual supporters’ opinion that the family language can help achieve his individuality. Contrarily, he felt the separateness more strongly. These bilingual educators also hold the point that their home gives them individuality. But he does not think so. He argues there are two types of individuality. One is public, one is intimate (private). Individuality can only be achieved through achieving public individuality. It is a very interesting point. However, later in this essay he says that after he could finally speak fluent English, strangely, he couldn’t speak Spanish fluently. And then he was mocked by his family members. And in some way, he lost his private individuality. Does he really agree with himself? It seems that the inability to speak fluent Spanish made him suffered. And maybe, he felt bad about achieving the so-called public individuality. As he says in the essay: “For my part, I felt that by learning English I had somehow committed a sin of betrayal…Rather, I felt I had betrayed my immediate family.” Maybe that’s why the tone is strong (at least to me) when arguing about public individuality. It reminds me of how one would try to prove something or persuade others particularly when they actually have doubts about it and are trying to make themselves believe it too. It looks like some kind of compensation to the author to think that public individuality is the most important and without which he couldn’t have achieved individuality, so that he wouldn’t feel so bad about losing private individuality to some extend.

Interestingly, some repetitions occurred. The schoolbooks covered with brown shopping-bag paper and people lowering their heads to listen to the author speaking Spanish (instead of English). Later he had the new discovery: the intimacy is not created by language itself, but the intimates. “I would dishonor our intimacy by holding on to a particular language an calling it my family language. Intimacy cannot be trapped within words; it passes through words. It passes. Intimacy leave the room. Door closed. Faces move away from the window. Time passes, and voices recede into the dark. Death finally quiets the voice. There is no way to deny it, no way to stand in the crowd claiming to utter ones’ family language.” It makes me think of how some international students become especially patriotic after they go abroad. They post how they miss home and wish they can go back. But why? Maybe they map their feelings towards their dear friends, family or even food onto their home country. Isn’t it strange? What they love is actually just memory. At the end of this essay, the author, when looking at the photo of his dear grandmother in her funeral, did not see the familiar face, but a “public” face, the face she had when “the clerk at Safeway asked her some question and I would need to respond”.

Aye, that’s what he means by “death finally quiets the voice”.

I felt a bit surprising as a non-native English speaker after reading this essay. As a university student, I am confused by different expectations from different communication courses. Compared to the communication course I took last term (SCIE 113), ENGL 112 seems to be a lot different. The expectations shift from being able to discuss scientific issues to writing good essays. It is vague to say “good” essays, but for now I am not sure I can explain it well because I only literally had two ENGL 112 lectures. Politics and the English Language shows Orwell’s opinions towards what is good and what is bad in terms of written English. He reveals the close relationship between language and thinking.

Orwell thinks “an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely”. This reminds me of 1984. Given that 1984 was finished later than this essay was published, I can sense some similarity between this essay and 1984. The basic idea is that language and thoughts can change each other. He discusses the modern English of his time and it is clear that he dislikes it. He later brings up another point: one can avoid being affected by consciously putting oneself on guard against the invasion of bad language.

Five examples representative of modern English are given and four categories of major problems are summarized.

Dying Metaphors: “incompatible metaphors are … a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.” Worn-out metaphors cannot evoke any visual image anymore. They “save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves”.

Operators Or Verbal False Limbs: the use of phrases instead of simple verbs are criticized. As a non-native speaker, this is the part where I started to feel surprised. When I saw “the range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations”, I wondered whether this coincides with the Newspeak rules mentioned in 1984.

Pretentious Diction: this part surprised me too. I used some words Orwell listed a lot, especially when I was taking SICE 113, but I guess scientific essays need scientific words so there is nothing wrong with it. Words improperly used in different context are discussed.

Meaningless Words: this part is interesting. Orwell thinks “Fascism” now has no meaning. We only know it means “something not desirable”. We also do not know the meaning of “democracy” because there is no official (or rather, agreed) definition of it. I agree with this part: “Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.” True. Then, does this count as a way of lying?

Orwell argues that “the whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness”. He translates a part of Ecclesiastes into what he considers modern English, and the translated version is really awkward. To me it looks like piles and piles of words and altogether the meaning is not clear. Not only bing not clear but also very confusing.

Language can have some unexpected effect on human. “Mechanically repeating the familiar phrases” turns one into being actually unconscious about what he or she is saying. Orwell points out that “a speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine”. There is no exaggeration about it. One detail is described as follows: “One often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them”. It is “favorable to political conformity” to reduce one’s consciousness by making he or she say things repeatedly.

Orwell consider insincerity to be the great enemy of clear language. One thing about expressing some abstract thinking, if we do not beware and let words come together “naturally”, then what we end up with can be very different from our thinking. It is contrary to what I accepted before: direct wordings formed by instinct are one’s true feeling and thinking. Six rules are then constructed:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell ends this essay by saying one cannot change all the problems of the modern English language all at once, but one can at least take a small step towards giving way useless phrases.

 

*Quoted sentences, unless otherwise cited, are all from George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language.

In this essay, Rauch discussed about prejudice specially in the form of language. He thinks that prejudices will always exist and should exits and offensive words should be freely used based on the consensus that intellectual freedom is important.

What is prejudice? I found that prejudice means “pre” and “judice”, namely, forming an opinion before justifying. By giving an example of a university student who thought homosexuality was a disease treatable with therapy. It does sound a lot like what we usually consider it to be – prejudice. Instead, Rauch said, was it just wrong belief or hypothesis? How to define prejudice precisely? We just feel it and make a conclusion whether something is a prejudice or not. Is the process it self a prejudice?

It is not only hard to define prejudice, but also, prejudice will exist. Because if we do believe in intellectual freedom, then along with the good things, racist speeches, offensive words etc. exist as well. Rauch argued that by letting all kinds of prejudices “fight” with one another, “what survives at the end of the day is our base knowledge”. If we want to eradicate (what we think are) prejudices, “it really means forcing everyone to share the same prejudice”. One sentence was quoted: “When complete agreement could not otherwise be reached, a general massacre of all who have not thought in a certain way has proved a very effective means of settling opinion in a country (Peirce, 1877).”

It was pointed out that pluralism allows mistakes and mistakes bring changes. It actually protects the minority and the dissent. Different from that, purism, as defined by Rauch, is a conviction that “society cannot be just until the last traces of invidious prejudice have been scrubbed away”. It is now very common in our society: in universities, school, criminal law and in the workplace. We now already have lists of words that are said to be offensive. It was suggested to avoid using them. According to Rauch, there is something fundamentally wrong with eradicating prejudice by changing words. Words are not violence. Violence is violence. He said, “It is no solution to define words as violence or prejudice as oppression, and then by cracking down on words or thoughts pretend that we are doing something about violence and oppression.”

Another thing is that purists realized that changing words is not enough. Mind must be changed to eradicate prejudice because “the mere existence of prejudice constructs a society whose very nature is prejudiced.” Isn’t that familiar? It reminded me of Newspeak in 1984. Who gets to decide what is acceptable, what is politically correct and what is biased and bigoted? As said before, prejudice itself will exit. This campaign can go on and on. It has problems: if some people have the power to decide what is not proper, the abuses are inevitable; does repressing prejudice eliminate it? Sadly in society, what we do to eliminate prejudice is often itself a prejudice. Also by excluding prejudice we exclude the minority. However, “the minority’s voices are powerful weapons”.

To finish up the thoughts, Rauch quoted from Salman Rushdie, “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”, and agreed with it.

 

*Quoted sentences, unless otherwise cited, are all from J. Rauch’s In Defense of Prejudice.