Friday, November 03, 2017
Doesn't know the meaning of meaning
The Imaginative Conservative has a (fairly old) article on the supposed benefits of teaching grammar.
The author starts out cleanly by quoting Orwell:
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it ... Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.Then he quotes an older scholar with the same point:
In the twelfth century, John of Salisbury wrote that “Those to whom the Trivium has disclosed the significance of all words ... do not need the help of a teacher in order to understand the meaning of books and to find the solutions to questions.” What is this “significance”? Literally, words are signs of reality. But perhaps what Salisbury means to convey is that things themselves, though quite real, are also, and ultimately, multiple signs of Reality.Orwell and Salisbury were talking about SEMANTICS, not GRAMMAR. Here's what happens when you study "grammar":
Of course, humility dictates always sitting at the feet of the wise, but perhaps the profound grasp of and adept use of words that a trivium education provides will enable one to complete anything essential to one’s learning on his own, remaining, of course, until death and after, at the feet of the Incarnate Word.Unreadable crap. Again, Orwell was NOT talking about grammar or "grammar". He was talking about SEMANTICS, determining and preserving the MEANING of words and phrases. This author doesn't know the MEANING of Orwell's prophecy because he's too busy "correcting" split infinitives and sentence-ending prepositions and replacing you with one. "The half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth" is not a belief, it's a FACT. Language and eyes and bones and hearts and lungs are all PURPOSES determined by the design of genes. Each of these organs grows and changes constantly, adapting to the constraints and resources available while always expressing its designed PURPOSE. The best way to defend your mind against Newspeak is to cling FIRMLY AND FEROCIOUSLY to naturally developed language and avoid all artificial cultivations, both the SEMANTIC atrocities of Newspeak and the GRAMMATICAL atrocities of Neoconspeak.
Labels: defensible spaces, Language update
¶ 11:41 AM
