[lit-ideas] Re: Usage in the USA?
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 08:28:45 -0400
Phil wrote:
http://tinyurl.com/6y4ta
The article is quite long but might be an entertaining read
for anyone at all interested in language use.
_____
What an understatement. Wallace's article is hilarious,
insightful, and instructive. Two brief morsels.
-----
As a practical matter, I strongly doubt whether a guy who
has four small kids and makes $12,000 a year feels more
empowered or less ill-used by a society that carefully
refers to him as "economically disadvantaged" rather than
"poor." Were I he, in fact, I'd probably find the PCE
[Politically Correct English] term insulting — not just
because it's patronizing but because it's hypocritical and
self-serving. Like many forms of Vogue Usage, PCE functions
primarily to signal and congratulate certain virtues in the
speaker — scrupulous egalitarianism, concern for the dignity
of all people, sophistication about the political
implications of language — and so serves the selfish
interests of the PC far more than it serves any of the
persons or groups renamed.
-----
I regard Academic English not as a dialectal variation but
as a grotesque debasement of SWE, and loathe it even more
than the stilted incoherences of Presidential English ("This
is the best and only way to uncover, destroy, and prevent
Iraq from reengineering weapons of mass destruction") or the
mangled pieties of BusinessSpeak ("Our Mission: to
proactively search and provide the optimum networking skills
and resources to meet the needs of your growing business");
and in support of this utter contempt and intolerance I cite
no less an authority than Mr. G. Orwell, who 50 years ago
had AE pegged as a "mixture of vagueness and sheer
incompetence" in which "it is normal to come across long
passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning."
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