Love of Language

The internet is the wild, untamed wilderness of literature.  Within the depths lies the undiscovered treasures of bloggers, great gems of knowledge.  Yet these priceless artifacts are hidden within a vast mire of mediocrity and baseness.  Searching for gold is a dirty task, one that leaves the explorer feeling desecrated.  And the expended effort is becoming disproportionately larger than the value of the nuggets gained.

Gone, perhaps forever, are the days when the beauty of the language mattered.  All that is left is stark efficiency.  Content is of the utmost importance in writing, but content is not everything.  Beauty matters; aesthetics add untold value to objects.  A piece of drywall and a few cinder blocks might make an effective TV stand, but the oak cabinet is worth more.

The language used online is stark.  Synonyms may as well be nonexistent; adjectives and adverbs are vanishing.  Why use a metaphor or simile to describe exactly what an idea should be when “very” can be inserted easily?  Phraseology is a forgotten science, forgotten and unmissed.  I am reminded of a scene in George Orwell’s 1984 where a character describes the malicious exercising of all the “dead weight” from the English language.

The situation is not as grim as I make it sound.  New words are being added, mostly nouns, but these nouns can in turn be transformed into verbs and adjectives.  And published authors employ versatile vocabularies for the most part.  Yet in the modern world, printed media is going by the wayside.  Everywhere newspapers are going out of print, and publishing houses are shutting down.  The internet is rapidly replacing printed media.  And so good writers are forced to become bloggers and hide amidst the mediocrity.

If this were the extent of the problem, I would not be raving.  Let’s face it, I am no John Milton.  From the beginning my writing has been efficient.  Academia discourages the use of “flowery” language; it muddles the issue, see?  No, I am not needed to describe the extremes of poor language on the internet.  What really gets under my skin is the fact that language experts seem to condone this process.

The English language, they argue, is a spoken language, and as such we should expect change all the time.  What I have mistaken for poor language, is really just the changes in speech.  I should get off my high horse and accept the beauty I find in language today.  One particular example roused my ire.  It was a video with the narrator’s word forming a collage of “LANGUAGE.”  The narrator described how what I judge to be bad language is just a dislike of what I find.  However, the man used proper grammar, he used better vocabulary than most, he even employed unusual phrasing that pleased the ear.  In short, the man wrote a beautiful piece that told me to accept the ugly as beautiful.

It was like being shown a Rembrandt and stick figures then being told that their beauty is equal.  It was like being given a four star meal and prepackaged meals and being informed that neither tastes better.  It was like hearing a symphony and an out of tune piano, and that both are pleasing to the ear.

Rubbish!  A change in language is not necessarily for the better; growth can be cancerous as well as beneficial.  I love the English language, and being asked to do away with various grammatical rules because this new generation is lazy is too much to bear.  I will not end a sentence with a preposition.  I will strive to find the word that is an exact fit to its context.  I will not sacrifice beautiful language with mere efficiency.  I will be a proper wordsmith.