Losing our grasp of language

Here's a modest suggestion for your Christmas stocking. The new edition of Jim O'Donnell's Wordgloss: A Cultural Lexicon, published by Lilliput, is a delightful cornucopia of words which I'd recommend to any enthusiastic reader.

Neither a dictionary nor a thesaurus, it seeks to address that lamentable human failing, whereby every time you come across perplexing words such as anomie or nugatory, you make a firm vow to nail them finally as soon as you get within hailing distance of a dictionary.

And, of course, you never do. Recognising this fact, O'Donnell has cleverly woven a lucid tapestry of mini-essays, alphabetically arranged, on the roots, history and meaning of words.

The resulting book is both a pleasure to read and an indispensable reference volume. It reminds us of how much we lose by not knowing the provenance of words as simple as (to pick at random) economics, television and orgy. A foreword from John Banville quotes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world."

Which brings us, inevitably, to Bertie Ahern. I was planning to make reference to the Taoiseach's now-infamous misspellings, but the nannyish software on my computer keeps changing "government" and "sympathy" to their correct versions. The limits of my world are apparently set by Bill Gates.

Anyhow, as several correspondents to The Irish Times have recently observed, it's a dangerous business these days for newspapers to start criticising others' usage of English. Declining standards across the board mean that most publications, including this one, are sprinkled with misspellings, typos and solecisms. Wordgloss helpfully informs us that a solecism is "a grammatical error, derived from the Greek soloikismos 'speaking like the citizens of Soloi', that is, incorrectly". Soloi was a colony of Athens, apparently, and the smug, sophisticated Athenians were inclined to sneer at their ruder countrymen. Jackie Healy-Rae would understand.

Politicians from Bertie Ahern to George W. Bush know that a certain amount of ungrammatical folksiness plays well with the electorate. Not for them the perfumed salons and bons mots of the Beltway or Ranelagh, they proclaim; they are men of the people.

But, whether the reaction to the Taoiseach's spelling errors was snobbishness of the Athenian variety or not, there surely is cause for concern, among journalists and others, at our society's increasingly tenuous grip on the basics of our language. In Wordgloss, both O'Donnell and Banville blame the disappearance of Latin and Greek from school curricula, which has deprived us of our understanding of the roots of words, particularly words in what O'Donnell calls the "upper register", in which we discuss abstract ideas of philosophy, science and the arts. But the simultaneous abolition by deranged 1960s educationalists of the study of English grammar, and the wider shift to a more audiovisually-driven information society, compounded the damage. We are now into the third generation of students educated in this manner, with the effects irreversible and plain to see.

So what, many might ask. The English language is not a museum piece. It takes different forms in different countries; its role as de facto Esperanto means that it is spoken and written as a second language by hundreds of millions of people. Much of its strength lies in its mutability, its protean energy. Who cares whether people confuse complement and compliment, think fulsome praise is a good thing or wouldn't recognise a hanging participle if it fell on them? All of this will in time be incorporated into the official language.

I'm not so sure. Apart from the not inconsiderable pain of seeing a beautiful language trampled on and abused, there's a threat to one of the cornerstones of a free society. We live in a world which is increasingly mysterious to us, our lives driven by technologies and forces we dimly comprehend at best. Professional elites such as the law and academia develop their own specialised, impenetrable dialects, which obscure their meaning for all but the initiated few. Meanwhile, general discourse is debased by a failure of clarity. The erosion of a shared, fairly rigorous set of rules on language and its usage leaves us open to the worst kinds of manipulation and obfuscation by those in positions of power and privilege.

The success of one of last year's most popular stocking-fillers, Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves, showed that there was a wide constituency of grumpy old men and women out there who are dismayed by what's happening. One wonders, though, whether the majority of the population - including many of those actually in a position to enforce higher standards - view us as nit-picking pedants, to be humoured and ignored. But I don't want to return to some dusty, fusty writing style of the past. Good writing should always be true to and of its own time. This is a more informal, less deferential age, and that's to be welcomed. It also, sadly, seems to be a time when the citizens of Soloi are finally getting their own back.

hlinehan@irish-times.ie