Can Quebec Rescue English?

Gerald Larose of Quebec has been appointed a special commissioner, charged with finding ways to rescue the French language from pollution and disintegration. By next May he is to present recommendations to the provincial government on how the purity of French can be preserved.

Watch this experiment closely. If it succeeds, let’s petition Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard to send Mr. Larose out here to rescue English, for it has been wounded, perhaps mortally, by our pseudo-intellectual class.

Mr. Larose might find the rescue of English a bigger job. It is, after all, a bigger language, 750,000 words, by the usual method of counting words.

English is the new Latin of the world, spoken everywhere as the language of business and even replacing the traditional French as the language of diplomacy. No sooner did English become popular in the non-English world the world than the people at home began poisoning it.

Army generals, academics, sociologists and bureaucrats are among the worst offenders. Their objective is to turn clear, declarative simple English into turgid, pompous gitch. The less understandable it is, the higher the speaker’s standing among the other semi-literates of what he chooses to call his peer group. There’s a strong suspicion that many of these people no longer know what they are trying to say, having devoted so much attention to form they have forgotten substance entirely. It began when the earnestly ignorant began to say importantly instead of important, the wrong word being chosen for no reason except that it has one more syllable than the correct word. Once people began talking importantly, nothing could stand against their pomposity.

American English has fallen on even worse times than ours, and in higher places.

George Bush, the former U.S. president, never mastered his native tongue. When he said something he often could not remember what it was he had wanted to say at the half way point in the sentence. His son, called Dubya, is apparently dyslexic and cannot read, ranking him with Ronald Regan who was able to read but wouldn’t.

Vice President Gore is, in a curious way, worse that these. He uses bad English aggressively, much in the way the hippopotamus will first defecate into the water and then thrash his tail about to throw stuff all over bystanders.

Andrew Ferguson,writing in a recent issue of Weekly Standard, analyzed one of Mr. Gore’s recent emissions: “In a Communist system, or a monarchy, or some other system that relies ultimately on a single decision maker, the role of government is to make all the decisions.” Mr. Ferguson translates this for us into real English: “In a system where government makes all the decision, it is the role of government to make all the decisions.”

Did Mr. Gore mean to say something as vapid and silly as this? Probably. It sounded good and meant nothing. Either that or he became so intoxicated with his own words he forgot what he originally intended to say, a common pattern among the new class of semi-literates.

Mr. Larose need not cross the border to find problems. There’s ample work for him here.

Here is an example from the local high school, a memo written by somebody with sufficient education to get a teacher’s certificate but not enough to have a command of his language.

This is an attempt to announce a meeting to discuss discipline among unruly Grade Eight students:

“The purpose of the meeting is to collaboratively define or establish designed experience for the Grade 8ers. That is, all of his/her experiences in the halls, the grounds and the classrooms are part of an intentional interface -- no laissez faire. One parameter is to embrace diversity while inculcating the integrity of our purpose.”

What can be done to prevent this man or woman from infecting pupils with that jargon that masquerades as the English language?

They would learn better from some old codger who wrote “you kids is actin roten so STOP IT you here me in the hed?” He, like the teacher, is only semi literate but unlike the teacher he has clung to language’s original purpose which is to carry an understandable message from one person to another.

If Quebec has a man who can teach English to our chattering classes, we will spread roses in the path that leads him to us and reward him with camels, apes and ivory.

July/02