How and why language is hardening in modern discourse

Unfamiliar words have entered everyday communication. I read German and Italian occasionally and have observed convergent changes in both.

I remember when words like ‘dialogue,’ ‘deliberation,’ and ‘conversation’ were used to describe interpersonal communication. Opening various newspapers recently, I have noticed a drift toward ‘debate’ and ‘discussion’. One notes, first of all, the silent hardening in the sounds: the ‘hard’ ‘deb-’ and ‘disc-’ has replaced the ‘soft’ ‘dia-’ and ‘deli-’. As the French say: c’est le ton qui fait la musique.

Words like ‘debate’ and ‘discussion’ suggest a duel of self-contained arguments – robust adversarial proceedings to be adjudicated either in parliament, in a court of law, or in the court of public opinion. ‘May the better thought win’ leaves the loser with nothing for his pains; his arguments are rejected, not accommodated.

Such intellectual posturing is not new. In Ancient Greece, Sophists were philosopher-teachers who travelled about in Greece teaching their students everything that was necessary to be successful in life, including rhetoric and public speaking. These were useful skills, where being persuasive could lead to political power and economic wealth. Without entering into the age-old debate that opposed Plato to the Sophists, one notes the different purposes. Plato looked for personal enlightenment. The Sophists wanted to persuade – sway public opinion in favour of their arguments. To this end, their statements needed to be self-contained and consistent, rather than open-ended, inclusive, and complex.²

Past iconography vividly depicts this type of conflict. In the painting Prudence (Minerva) Overthrowing Ignorance (or Sedition) by Peter Paul Rubens, Ignorance – the opposite of Prudence – is shown literally without breeches long before the term became an epithet.

The fading away of poetry

A new edition of Of the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus has just come out in German. My 1956 translation by Karl Büchner was in hexameter – all 7,400 of them. Reading the introduction, one senses that the effort has transformed the translator’s style: the text is fluid – the ease of someone who has mastered language.⁴ Klaus Binder’s 2014 version is ‘rhythmic prose’: the loss of ambition is telling. Many factors might have been at work: new compromises in making the work accessible to readers, time and effort involved. I would also point to the loss of sensibility for the beauty of verse.⁵

In reading contemporary lyrics, one is struck by the disappearance of rhythm: under the guise of ‘freedom’, the texts are mostly plain prose, whimsically broken up into ‘verses’ for visual effect – or to imitate Twitter messages. Lucretius’ texts were read aloud (even by a solitary reader); now, verses are looked at as blocks.

Concept cars

Expensive cars, being status symbols, invite us to decode the images contemporary cars project. Here is a ‘concept car’ from Lexus, which may be taken as a harbinger of styles to come.

What one notes is the combination of soft lines and cutting edges, or the dark lines of the radiator grill. The Star Wars analogy is discernible:

Earlier radiator grills, recalling sharks’ mouths, look downright quaint by comparison. Cars have grown in size (and not just length), have become over-towering and overweening, and their lines increasingly recall aggressive bodybuilding bulges.

Are times a-hardening?

It would be easy to take such examples of ‘hardening’ (or at least flattening) of communication as a sign of the ages. While one should notice such subtle persuaders, a sense of proportion is advisable. If Heraclitus’ analogy of life being a river is apt, then the underlying currents of life’s flow – which we call experience – might be of far greater import than publicity posters along its banks.

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1. For a learned discussion, see Franco Moretti, La letteratura vista da lontano. For those who enjoy testing this proposition, I recommend Wordle. Wordle is a tool for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.

2. False analogies flow back and forth between the personal and the public. Personal and public ethics are intertwined, often with disastrous results (see ‘Is the Right Choice a Good Bargain?‘ by Michael Waltzer).

3. Note the overt class and sexist undertone: the losing side is labelled ‘Ignorance or Sedition.’ This iconography is understandable in Rubens’ time. The 17th century was a period of revolutions worldwide. In hindsight, climate change – not ignorance – helped drive these conflicts (see Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century by Geoffrey Parker).

4. A presentation of the work can be found in Piergiorgio Odifreddi (2013), Come stanno le cose: Il mio Lucrezio, la mia Venere. For a discussion of Lucretius’ subtle role in modernity, see The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt.

5. For an example from a very different context, see Samuel Ha-Naguid (2001), Guerre, amour, vin et vanité. Anatolia, Éditions du Rocher, Monaco—a prose translation of Jewish medieval poetry from courtly Granada.

This post was first published on DeepDip.

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