October-December 2008 |
Volume 13, Number 4 - Editorial |
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When in Rome
Ever
since the Reformation, too many Englishmen have prided themselves on their
incapacity for logical thought, and on their national “genius for muddling
through.” It is not surprising, then, that they are susceptible to fits of
linguistic totalitarianism from those who do indeed have a conscious (if
malign) agenda, and who are prepared to enforce it. After a decade of Blairism, it need astonish no-one that we should witness
another attempt at verbal thought-policing.
Precisely because the
English language is the richest in the world, it offers a temptation to those
who, under the promptings of class or religious animosity, want to impoverish
it. During the 1930s and 1940s the chief linguistic fashion in Britain was for
so-called Basic English, devised by a professor and ardent pagan, Charles Kay
Ogden, who believed everything worth saying could be
said with a vocabulary of 850 words. As might be predicted, the Basic English
Bible translation (1941-49) displays a truly priceless gaucherie. Its version
of St John’s Gospel begins: “From the first he was the Word, and the Word was
in relation with God and was God.”
Even as a medium for
good solid anti-Catholic propaganda of the type dear to innumerable English
hearts, Basic proved to be useless. Churchill, for a while, fell in love with
Basic and tried to recruit the ferociously Protestant Duke of Devonshire into
disseminating it. The Duke asked a characteristic question: “What is ‘To hell
with the Pope’ in Basic?” Back came the answer from the Basic glossary: “The
Holy Father must go to a hot spot.” The Duke rejected this immediately, and no
more was heard of the Basic crusade.
Nowadays, luckily,
Basic English has been forgotten, except for Orwell’s ridicule of it in 1984. Sadly, recent news reports of
local governments in the UK have demonstrated that the same egalitarian itch
which gave us Basic, more than half a century back, is
still being scratched.
Bournemouth Council,
Dorset, revealed (BBC News, 3
November 2008) that it has supplied a list of “eighteen Latin phrases which its
staff are advised (in practice, ordered) not to use, either verbally
[presumably the council means “orally”] or in official correspondence.” And
what are these “eighteen Latin phrases” which must no longer be permitted to
assail ratepayers’ tender susceptibilities? They include “e.g.”, “ad hoc”,
“bona fide”, and “ad lib.”: not very obscure terms, we might have supposed.
Nonetheless, other
councils, such as Salisbury’s, have now followed Bournemouth’s lead, sometimes
concerning other tongues as well as Latin. The councils of Aberdeenshire, and
Blackburn with Darwen (this last in Lancashire), have
now forbidden (Daily Telegraph, 2
November) the phrase “in lieu”, simply because its origin is – quelle horreur! –
French.
Such political
correctness has not gone without opposition. Cambridge classics professor Mary
Beard has told the Telegraph: “This
is absolute bonkers and the linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing. English
is and always has been a language full of foreign words.” Another British
classics academic, Peter Jones, is quoted in The Daily Mail (3 November) as saying:
“This sort of thing sends out the message that language is about nothing more than the communication of very basic information in the manner of a railway timetable. But it is about much more than that. The great strength of English is that it has a massive infusion of Latin. We have a very rich lexicon with almost two sets of words for everything. To try and wipe out the richness does a great disservice to the language. It demeans it. I am all for immigrants raising their sights not lowering them.”
In this edition of Oriens we launch a regular feature on the
Latin language by the Tasmanian classicist, Dr David Daintree. But a discussion
of Latin should not be confined to the scholarly sphere. There are broader
cultural, even political, implications. This hostility toward Latin, and its influence upon the English language,
exhibited by Britain’s nanny-statists represents a concentrated form of that abhorrence
for any language or speech that evokes modes of thought considered fit for
banishment from “modern society” and branded accordingly as “sexist”, “racist”,
or “elitist”. Derbyshire’s Amber Valley Council, for example, has prohibited
“man-made” (its employees must say “synthetic”), “one-man show” (its employees
must say “one-person show”), and “forefathers” (its
employees must say “ancestors”).
Catholics have been
dismally familiar over the last forty years with the consequences of such
meddling. Quite apart from the expulsion of Latin from Catholic worship, we
have had to endure since the 960s liturgies thick with mistranslations of the
original texts; to suffer sermons which assume that congregations are densely
populated with simpletons; and to endure a decline of the official Catholic
press from a vehicle of serious discussion to little more than a clearinghouse
for official media releases heavily laden with lifeless “new church” jargon. We
did not need Orwell’s warnings – valuable though they are – to teach us the
interconnection between slovenly thinking and slovenly language. Most parish
churches demonstrate this interconnection every Sunday.
But why should we
bother with linguistic corruption at a time like the present? Surely there are
matters of greater moment calling for our attention? What about the Wall Street
crashes and international financial meltdown; or the election to the White
House of a candidate, unprecedented in American history, with a consistent
record of support for the most radical policies on human life, the family, and
limiting free speech?
Whatever changes in
public, economic, and domestic life these ill-omened events foreshadow, we can
be confident that every contraction or bizarre expansion of human freedom
required to build the world glimpsed in vision by our leaders will be furnished
with its own supporting instruments of linguistic and symbolic manipulation. So
it was during the Communist revolutions of the twentieth century, and so it has
been during the cultural revolution which, beginning
in the 960s, has swept unabated through the Western world of whose internal
crisis that of the Catholic Church forms an inseparable part.
To heal the
revolutionary damage inflicted upon Western civilisation calls for the countervailing
influence of truth, clarity, and resonance in language and symbol. This, in
turn, requires the recovery of truth, clarity, and resonance in the central
religious acts of Western civilisation – in particular, in the rites of worship
whence Western civilisation drew its inspiration and in the context of which
its character was formed.
It is a statement of the obvious to say that various have been the influences that have worked upon the making our culture. What is less obvious today – though it can still surprise us with its palpable presence – is the Latin character of Western civilisation. To belong to Western culture is to belong to a Roman world. In order to know how to live in such a world, one might take the advice of that consummate Roman – though he was Milanese – St Ambrose: “Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more.” “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
Here
is a piece of wisdom. It is good as much for those who live in a Roman Church
as for those who live in a Roman world.
