Original-From: hlwpk!ktw (Kenneth T Wolman +1 201 564 2866)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.words-l
Date:         Tue, 14 Apr 1992 16:00:00 EDT
 <WORDS-L%UGA.bitnet@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU>
From:         ktw%HLWPK.ATT.COM@VTVM2.CC.VT.EDU
Subject:      Re: ODDS 'N' ENDS
Comments: To: English Language Discussion Group <WORDS-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>

From Judith:

>Torkel seems to be afraid that our culture is going to go down
>the tubes (may I say "go down the tubes" rather than
>"disintegrate"?) because "we" permit a lax use of language.
                           ^^^^^^^^^^

I think the quotation marks are in the wrong place if we are
discussing the Decline and Fall....  Somehow, I sense that we are
talking about PERMISSION or ACQUIESCENCE as the key concept here: the
"we" is understood.

The key (for me) to Torkel's original comment:

>>How do you conclude, from linguistics or by any other means, that
>>there is nothing wrong with a change in human culture whereby
                   ^^^^^
>>there is no further need for mathematics or literature?

I don't have an answer to any of this: I simply want to add to the
confusion.  Torkel's original posting seemed to cast this not as a
linguistic but as a moral situation, which may bring some of the list
philosophers (I am not one) running.  Do people control the evolution
of their culture?  CAN they control it?  Who is the THEY with this
control?  For whom do THEY act?  What is their motive?  Who has
defined what from within the culture is worth preserving?  Who can
decide to what extent the population should be exposed to this
still-to-be-defined stuff?

In all this, some question of values is at work: what is important to
whom, and why.  I would like everyone to read James Wright, C. K.
Williams, William Shakespeare, and me.  I would like everyone to
listen to Beethoven's late string quartets and to Puccini's early
operas.  I would like everyone to think Marc Chagall is the greatest
painter since Michelangelo, and that my friend Melynda Reid in
Greensboro, Florida, has the greatest drawing hand since William Blake
and Goya.  I also know none of this is likely to happen, and I cannot
imagine a situation where I could impose an aesthetic or cultural
Republic of Virtue that would compel people to read what *I* think is
important or listen to what *I* think is important or look at what *I*
think is important.

So who defines what is important?  Who PERMITS the word "heavy" to
acquire meanings having nothing to do with physical weight?  It's
certain that somebody does, becauses fashions are made, and so are
rules.  Languages change their shape and even their vocabularies
because of shifts that I am in no position to define: but the "usual
suspects" can be dragged in: social or historical (i.e., extraliterary
or extralinguistic) changes.

Even if nobody says outright "HEAVY may now be used in 10 different
senses," and enumerates them, the fact that nothing is said against
these uses is in fact a form of permission.  Silence is consent, etc.

Maybe we are discussing "cultural literacy," "the Canon," and issues
that go far beyond the use of one word.  Who makes the rules?  Ashley
Montague, who back in the 1950s wrote a book called _The Cultured Man_
[sic!] in which he had the arrogance to suggest that he knew what made
someone "cultivated"?  Or his inheritor, the repentant
Deconstructionist E. D. Hirsch?

I don't know why language changes, why cultural "artifacts" or
"monuments" go in and out of fashion.  I am not comfortable with the
possibility that language may indeed evolve one day into a series of
grunts keyed to what is thrown at us by the evening news, and that we
as a "race" will become unable to absorb texts that are longer than
the average article in _People_ magazine.  As someone for whom words
are both a living and a vocation, I feel threatened by that kind of
change.  But how do I or any of us prevent it?  By imposing a kind of
"Academy" standard on the language, on literature, on what is and is
not proper form in any area?

The only thing that frightens me more than the disintegration of
language and "culture" is the unseen face of the arbiters of
preservation of what is Pure and Good.

Ken
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU