In my case it is in part a classical ruin, inherited boulders of Tacitus and Cicero bleaching in the sun along with grass-overrun elements of Thucydides and Aeschylus … not because I was a classical scholar, but because I was taught by classical scholars and grew up on poets, dramatists and novelists who knew the classics as intimately as most people of my generation know the Beatles and the Stones. My language (as the sum of my discourses, as linguistic strata that betray my history, as geology or archaeology betrays history) is my language and it is a piece of who I am, perhaps even the defining piece. It would be hard to dress it down into something raggedly demotic without it being a patronising pastiche of a street argot to which I quite evidently have no access and in whose mazy slang avenues I would soon get lost, innit? In a sense I am typecast linguistically and although I can for fun try on all kinds of brogues and dialect clothes, my voice, my style, my language is as distinctive as my fingerprints. I can attempt to disguise my language, I can dress it up into even more elaborate and grandiose orotundity, prolixity and self-consciousness, Will Self-consciousness you might say, or I could dress it down into something stripped. Nonetheless, I can no more change my language and the sum of its discourses than I can add a cubit to my height or, sadly it seems, take a pound from my weight.
I am in some sort a language professional I suppose, in as much as I write and broadcast, I linguify for a living you might say. In this instance of parole I am using not only English, but my own brand of English, an English English salted, spiced, pickled, seasoned, braised and plated up to you bearing all the flavours of my class, gender, education and nature, discourses as you might call them. The two for consideration however as those once fashionable Frenchies designated them are Langue, language as an idea, and parole, language as utterance. Of course aside from both of these, there is the local tongue, English, French, Cantonese, Basque, whatever. There is language, the human capacity – ‘competence’ as Chomsky calls it, The Game of Language – and there is utterance, the actual instance of its use – this sentence for example. The Game of Chess and that game of chess going on over there. There is Chess and there is this or that game of chess. And then there is this or that example of language in praxis, in use. There is language, the thing itself, the idea of language. So bearing in mind that I am fully aware that I sound like the worst kind of pseudo-intellectual twazzock, let’s look at that distinction. We can make fun of this kind of language about language and we can value it too. Actually the one doesn’t cancel out or refute the other. I wrote a sketch about this years and years ago and if you know it, you’ll have to forgive the similarities between what I found to be a source of humour and what I am now apparently taking seriously. I suppose we should remind ourselves of the old distinction made by the structuralists and structural linguists. But is there a “higher language”, a purer language, a proper language, a right language? Is language a whore, used, bruised and abused by every john in the street … is the idea of purifying the dialect of the tribe a poetic ideal or nonsensical snobbery? Eliot said much the same thing in a different way: “to purify the dialect of the tribe”. “Language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin,” wrote Karl Kraus or somebody so like him that it makes no odds. Somebody once said, “How can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?” Is language being degraded, is it not what it was? Is there a right way to express yourself and a wrong? Grammar, does that exist, or is it a pedantic imposition, a kind of unnatural mixture of strangulation and straightening, like pleaching, pollarding and training pear-trees against a wall? Can we translate from one tongue into another without irreparable loss? And many, many more. Is language the father of thought? There’s one. There are so many questions and issues jostling, tumbling and colliding in my mind that I can barely list them.
I write to you today on this subject as a way of welcoming you to 2.0 and because, well, it’s a subject worth thinking about at any time and because fewer things interest me quite so much. In the end it all comes down to language.