Compossible Conspiracy? How Rupert Murdoch and George Bush are Destroying the English Language
by Carlyn Reichel, Opinions Editor on October 3, 2008 in Opinion
I have railed many a time against the high crimes and misdemeanors that our soon-to-be-ex-president has committed against the English language. I have even recommended our glorious leader be welcomed into retirement by a Nuremburg-style tribunal - a recommendation I made (mostly) jokingly, of course. I won’t enumerate the multiple misstatements of our offender-in-chief, partly because most of you are well aware of these “Bushisms,” and partly just because it angers me to think about them.
One would imagine that a basic requirement for leading the people of this country would be to speak the primary language comprehensibly. As a student of history and government, I long for the eloquence of a Jefferson. As a realist, I’d settle for a Ford. I’m not asking for Milton-esque imagery or Shakespearean constructions, I’m asking for basic subject-verb agreements.
And now, as if eight years were not enough, George W. Bush is residually lowering the bar on communication skills by the horrifying force of his example. In fact, he has forced Barack Obama to wage simultaneous campaigns about policy and syntax. Bush’s legacy? The notion that the candidate you “want to grab a beer with” isn’t the guy who can “correctly pronounce the world nuclear.” And to keep this as non-partisan as possible, from a strictly elocutionist perspective, even John McCain would constitute a welcome relief from Bush’s linguistic tyranny.
Call me an elitist if you must, but last week I heard the news that confirmed all my greatest fears about the crisis in English-speaking society. The Collins English Dictionary is officially booting words that aren’t deemed popular enough anymore. The owner of Collins - and this brings me to the second front in the war on the English language - is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
As if controlling a huge chunk of the world’s media weren’t enough of an exercise in mind control, the News Corp media conglomerate is now setting parameters on our language use. Here is the list of words we are about to lose (you’ll want to get your non-Collins dictionaries out for these):
abstergent, agrestic, apodeictic, caducity, caliginosity, compossible, embrangle, exuviate, fatidical, fubsy, griseous, malison, mansuetude, muliebrity, niddering, nitid, olid, oppugnant, periapt, recrement, roborant, skirr, vaticinate, vilipend.
OK, OK, so they’re not words you often see outside the GRE (and I KNOW at least “vilipend” was on there). And it’s ostensibly true the words aren’t being dumped for the sake of culling the language, but rather to make room for new ones coming on line. But isn’t preserving our language, even the unpopular bits of it, the principal duty of a dictionary?
These are words that pinpoint specific ideas we don’t otherwise express, and they are slowly falling out of use. So much so that my spellchecker is already marking at least half of them as misspelled. Take the idea of something that is compossible, something that is only possible in coexistence with something else - what a perfect word and way of thinking for a group of students studying a highly interconnected, even embrangled field, such as public policy.
The ultimate fear is that by circumscribing our language, we will end up circumscribing our thought. How will we be able to come up with innovative solutions to our problems if we are losing the very words with which to formalize and communicate them? Will we lose the idea that something can be unquestionably true if we lose the word apodiectic? And if apodiectic is taken out to make room for “truthiness” - one of Collins competitor Merriam-Webster’s 2006 “words-of-the-year” - does that mean we lose something in the nature of truth itself?
Plus, fubsy is just fun to say.
Maybe I’m dialing up the alarmist rhetoric a bit prematurely here, but I vaticinate a future where any word of more than three syllables is gradually stricken from public discourse, and ever so slowly condemned to the realm of “ye olde” English relics. Or, in a more 1984-like world, once you rewrite the dictionary, it might just be as though these words had never existed at all.
That’s what makes the one-two, Bush-Murdoch punch so truly gut-wrenching. A slow acceptance of the “aw, shucks” leadership style that Bush’s eight years in office has exemplified, coupled with the corporate ability to institutionalize low expectations that News Corp brings to the table (not just through dictionaries but through cable news, radio, and print media too), leads to a populace lulled into believing this must be the best we can do.
Talk about a vast right-wing conspiracy. Just watch your language when you do.
Editor’s note: For now, we as a public are still being given the opportunity to save these words from extinction. Collins has launched a campaign to see which, if any, of these words can be resurrected between now and February 2009 before they land on the chopping block for good. So, my estimable HKS faculty and colleagues, I exhort you to fill your papers and public statements with as many of the above words as you can between now and then - after all, what’s a few months of pretention when the eyes of history are upon us?
Comments
One Response to “Compossible Conspiracy? How Rupert Murdoch and George Bush are Destroying the English Language”
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I agree with you wholeheartedly.
My understanding of the English language at best is not very good, I blame my bad eduction for my lack of English comprehension, all of the words that you state have been scrubbed from the Murdoch Publication “The Collins English Dictionary ” I personally, have never used any of them, but that is not to say I never will or would.
You’d think that fella such as Rupert Murdoch would love and cherish the words that make up the language, after all he is in the business of spreading news and gossip so what better instrument to his trade is there other than language?
I think educational establishments and libraries should not stock any Collins books, Rupert Murdoch must learn that owing a dictionary means, he is the keeper of our language and not maker. Bush should go back to doing what he does best, drinking himself into a stupor.