The Meaning of Economy in Language

I'm going to attempt to extend the olive branch to both sides here. I've argued extensively with Tom about what "economy" or "efficiency" in language means, and I still look with great skepticism upon some of his linguist-centric distinctions, especially as a person who also possesses much experience working with relatively unrelated languages like Spanish, Russian, Croatian, Azeri, Uzbek, Georgian, Persian, and Arabic. However, I didn't really want to talk about my own experiences with learning these foreign langauges and how these languages compare in terms of difficulty or economy but rather about how I see my own native language of English being transformed and redefined by forces that are largely beyond my control.

As a resident of the Washington, DC area, every now and then I'll go out of my way to pay homage to President Lincoln and the Lincoln Memorial, usually because someone has paid homage to me by paying me a visit and would like to see the memorial him or herself. While I have lived a sufficient amount of time in DC during the last thirteen years to be thorougly bored with visiting the same memorial that I see on the Metro as I ride to and from work day in and day out, I still find it awe-inspiring to walk up the steps of the Lincoln Memorical and read on the inside flanks the inscriptions of the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address.

Everytime I read those, I always remember that "economy" in English meant a much different thing a little over a century ago than it does today. Today, in US law schools, we have law professors who ridicule the flamboyant and verbose writings of their British and American predecessors while at the same time holding in great esteem the legal logic behind these cases. It makes very little sense to me how a concept of a "standard" or "correctness" or "beauty" in a language could change so remarkably in the course of a few generations, but the fact remains it has.

American English today has almost become the functional equivalent of the most simplistic of a Russian predicate: eto -- horosho. I concede that this makes reading newspapers and legal cases and scientific journals much, much easier. However, at the same time, Dietwald is right; we've lost a sense of greater meaning that words can convey. This is evident in the current political discourse in the United States where we search in vain for words that create the pretense of a calming, temporary consensus, which is afterall a prerequesite for political action in our American variant of democracy, amid rough seas of massive disagreement and discontentment. Instead, all we seem to find these days are exact words to describe our most strident beliefs without ever being forced to couch our words and statements in such a way that make our polar ideas digestable and somewhat agreeable to our sworn political enemies.

British English has retained some of these chivalrous ways of speaking in such contentious political forums as the House of Commons, and while they may sound silly to most Americans bored enough to watch the standard weekly inquistion of the PM on the BBC or CSPAN, there is a reason that still to this day in the US Senate and House, members refer to each other by the "honorable" or the "esteemed member from such and such state". It's not economical language in that this little verbal flourish does little to convey additional meaning to any of the ideas being expressed by the respective speakers. Nonetheless, this simple sugarcoating manages to perform miracles in making people who, if given the chance, would love to throw punches or even fire bullets at each other, remember that language, as much as it has the power to divide, also has the power to unite.

Maybe it's a good thing that the many foreigners who visit and settle in the United States each year no longer have to communicate in the complex, run-on sentences of President Lincoln, and maybe it's a good thing that when someone with just a high school or college education reads the first paragraph of a modern Congressional act or Supreme Court case, they actually can identify an actor and an action before being inundated by a gazillion subordinate clauses. At the same time, I, as a well-read English-speaker who enjoys a good complex sentence every now and then with a well-placed adjective or adverb and a metric to die for, lament the fact that my fellow compatriots have barely the attention span necessary to follow a few hundred words of what is considered today to be several giant run-on sentences composing Lincoln's address on the blood-soaked fields of Gettysburg. What's even sadder for me is that these "English speakers" no longer can appreciate the visceral emotions that Lincoln's words once evoked compared to a thirty-second commercial with an American flag and the destroyed World Trade Towers and Springstein's "I'm proud to be an American..." playing in the background.

Lincoln's Gettysbury Address to me represents the classical ideal of American politicians using language to unite a divided people, while the latter is an all-too-prevalent example of Reaganesque/Khruschevesque cliches that defined the simplistic black and white of the Cold War where one was either good or bad but never both, and therefore, never one in the same with his enemy in terms of human needs or wants or dreams. By today's standards, it is the economical cliche that wins the democratic election. That said, I still remain a firm believer in the power of inefficient verbosity of my political leaders in identifying a common ground and in bringing people together in a time of uncertainty and human struggle, where there are few clear lines that can be drawn to separate human beings into the good and the bad.

In short, American English language may be much more economical than it once was a little more than a century ago, but it is a stretch to say that economical implies either "useful" or "beautiful". If economical does imply utility, then please explain how, because all I seem to hear or read anymore are platititudes from English-speakers too scared or too lazy to explore the limits of a langauge that at one time could be biting, hilarious, morose, transcendent, and hopeful all in the same sentence. Maybe my nostalgia for creative and inspiring English is misguided in this age of on-demand multimedia and casts me in the mold of a Ted Kaczynski-luddite, but I still feel the English-speaking world has lost an appreciation for the power of uneconomic language to explicate and unite over the power of economic images to obfuscate and divide, and that we, as English-speakers, will not rediscover this appreciation anytime soon, so long as our attention spans are barely sufficient to reply to the next of a thousand daily text messages, e-mails, or cell phone calls devoid of any and all attempts to process a certain reality and to reflect that reality back at a larger community of English-speakers for further interpretation.