The Terrible, Horrible Things We Did To Terrible And Horrible

Or, The Perverse Pixelation Of The English Language

“the bitch set me up”

Here’s something that probably won’t surprise any of you: when I was nineteen years old I got into a shouting match with my linguistics professor on the first day of class. He was a timid Chinese immigrant with slouching shoulders and a frustratingly thick accent; at the time I was bewildered that he had chosen linguistics, primarily in English, as his field of study, but in retrospect I am both charmed and impressed. I, on the other hand, was a perpetually furious and deeply unhandsome young man with out-of-proportion quadriceps and a mouse-brown mullet above a single massive eyebrow.

Our conversation was sparked by a pair of statements he made in his opening address to the sixty or so sophomores sitting around me. I can now admit that he was entirely correct about his first assertion, to be covered at the end of this piece, but I didn’t much like it — and his second statement brought me right up to my feet. Imagine the above-described meek fellow stumbling through the following sentence, and I apologize in advance for replicating his accent in text:

“Brack Engrish contains just as much meaning as White Engrish.”

“Okay, first off,” I snapped, standing up with a rapidity that terrified the poor girl sitting next to me, “I don’t think ‘Black English’ and ‘White English’ are terms we should allow ourselves to use in proper conversation.” What I meant at the time was that I considered it hugely racist to assign an accent to skin color. This was because I was approximately as naive as Dory The Fuckin’ Fish In Finding Nemo and also because I’d grown up around educated, successful Black people on the East Coast who sounded just like my dad and my mom.

(In 2022, of course, The Powers That Be use the term AAVE in place of Brack Engrish. I still think it’s stupid and racist, which means I’m still naive.)

The class held its collective breath; 1990 was very much in between the periods where it was (and is) considered somewhere between meritorious and mandatory to challenge professors, even associate ones. Paying zero attention to any of this, I continued.

“And if by ‘Black English’, you mean the dialect spoken in American cities, you are dead wrong. That degraded form of the language is absolutely not equal to standard English in its ability to communicate everything from engineering concepts to philosophical differences.” Some girl made a sound that was between a cough and a screech. The poor bastard teaching the class looked around for help, didn’t see any, and (to his credit) decided to argue the point.

For the sake of brevity I’ll distill our arguments into two sentences.

The professor believed that you could take any possible White English sentence and “translate” it into Black English without a loss of meaning.

The student believed that Black English was far more context-dependent than White English and therefore was inferior as a language for requiring that additional context.

Our argument took up the rest of the fifty-minute session, after which I went to the registrar and dropped the class. I did not believe the two of us would reconcile our opinions; furthermore, dropping the class would allow me another hour in bed three times a week to tap the ass of this broad I was banging in a very short-term meaningless thing that could absolutely never wind up with her living with me from 1994 to 2009 and becoming the sainted mother of my son.

I may be slightly less (meaning, not at all) enthusiastic about short-term relationships thirty-two years later, but I have retained and indeed strengthened my affection for English as a means of communication. My mother spoke seven languages fluently; I have just the one. A smattering of French, Spanish, and Latin from school impressed me not at all. Like Victor Wooten, who took the time he would have spent on other instruments and put it into his instrument, I did the minimum in those other tongues so as to not distract from the object of my true linguistic affection.

My love is not a sort of blind love, mind you. The English of Beowulf does nothing for me, being a series of grunting utterances inferior to the Latin or even French of the era. Chaucer’s English is far better, but it is still a limited tool, as we see in what was probably the first ass-eating incident to be committed to vellum on the scepter’d isle:

Derk was the nyght as pich, or as a cole.

And at the wyndow out she putte hir hole

And Absolon, hym fil no bet ne wers

But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers

Ful savorly, er he were war of this

Abak he stirte, and thoughte it was amys

For wel he wiste a womman hath no berd

He felte a thyng al rough and long yherd,

In 2022 he’d have been none the wiser about what had happened; what young woman doesn’t shave bare front and back now, except at the request of a Gen-X Tinder revenant? And don’t they all show up exfoliated and pink from the salon? But I digress.

It is the English of Johnson and Pope and Melville and Hawthorne that fires my imagination, that pair of centuries where the language finished a Precambrian bloom of borrowing from other languages and wholesale neologism leading to stuff like

Trace science then, with modesty thy guide;

First strip off all her equipage of pride;

Deduct what is but vanity, or dress,

Or learning's luxury, or idleness;

Or tricks to show the stretch of human brain,

Mere curious pleasure, or ingenious pain;

Expunge the whole, or lop th' excrscent parts

Of all our Vices have created Arts;

Then see how little the remaining sum,

Which serv'd the past, and must the times to come!

This English of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and (prewar) twentieth centuries is expansive, magnificent, and above all precise. There are so many different words from which to choose, each with a slightly different shade of meaning. Incandescent is not glowing which in turn is not luminous which is also not radiant. If we get into the realm of “twenty-dollar words”, in Strunk and White’s terms, then things get really exciting; you can argue the superiority of thaumaturgy vis-à-vis prestidigitation.

And then it all went wrong. You can blame the aforementioned Strunk and White, whose Elements Of Style militated against complex words in favor of simpler phrases. In fact, they’d likely have preferred that I write

whose Elements Of Style worked strongly to prevent the use complex words

but that’s not quite the same, because to militate is also, to some degree, to be strident. So while you get the same general idea from the two sentences, the first conveys slightly more information to the educated man.

You could also censure Ernest Hemingway, whose forceful “masculine” simplicity was the face that launched a million intellectually impoverished (which is not the same as poor!) imitators (which is not the same as copycats). I think that radio and television bear a bigger share of the responsibility than any mere author; much like the YouTube videos of any given automotive publication will be profoundly more ignorant and devoid of nuance than that publication’s written work, the “TV-isation” of everything after World War II reduced a lot of complex concepts into simple ideas. (Not all languages use a different word for concept and idea.)

My former employer recently acquired, at astounding expense, a website called Motorious. I was told that the site deliberately operated at a seventh-grade reading level, with the strong implicit suggestion that perhaps I should start doing the same. So I went to find out what a seventh-grade book was nowadays. I knew, obviously, that it wasn’t the sort of stuff I was personally reading in seventh grade; I think that was the year I finished Toland’s The Rising Sun and Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil. Turns out that the #1 recommended seventh-grade book is: a graphic novel titled Sisters.

Here’s an excerpt.

To me, this book reads like something for eight-year-olds, or possibly the mentally handicapped. I’d rather be unemployed than write that sort of simple tripe. I can’t believe that we can’t expect more out of seventh-graders nowadays, nor am I particularly charmed at the idea that adults would willingly read anything at that level.

Sisters, along with Hemingway’s worst work and so-called Brack Engrish, represent what I think of as a pixelation of the English language. By using simpler words and concepts, we reduce the resolution of what we read and write. You still get the general idea, just like you can theoretically pick up a “dub”, or win, in Warzone at 1024x768 resolution instead of the glorious 3840 x 2160 res I get out of my Alienware Aurora R11, but you miss the details.

Final example: how many younger people truly know the difference between terrible and horrible? It’s a big difference, clearly communicated by the root words involved. Something that is terrible inspires terror: his terrible swift sword. Something that is horrible inspires (duh) horror: The horrible countenance of my victim was for ever before my eyes.

I guarantee you, however, that if you quiz ten high schoolers on this subject you will find out that nine of them cannot tell you the difference, and that they just consider both words to be synonyms for bad. Neither of which they’d bother to use, of course. The most common synonyms for bad nowadays are trash and fucked. Indeed, the fuck-word and the shit-word are the sovereigns and cosmonauts of context-sensitive dialects like Brack Engrish:

You see that fucking shit, man? That shit’s fucked. I didn’t want to fuck with that shit, but I fucks with the dude who does that shit, you know, so when the shit happened I was like, fuck.

In context, accompanied by gestures, tones of voice, and general awareness of the encompassing (not the same as surrounding) situation, that phrase makes enough sense for general consumption. But it falls some ways short of conveying the sort of information you get from

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

An associate professor looking to endear himself with a classroom might follow this up with, “In other words, shit’s fucked”, but that is a pixelation. It is seen through a glass, darkly, with just the outlines visible.

Most other languages, including and especially Latin, are remarkably more context-sensitive than Victorian English. In a way, the language serves as synecdoche (which is not the same as metaphor) for the Victorian Englishman himself. He did not expect to find a familiar context overseas; his job was to bring his own meaning to places that were considered to be wild and savage (not the same thing). Every Victorian gentleman was a sort of portable England; he knew most of what was required to replicate the culture, the meaning, elsewhere.

Similarly, a good sentence in Johnson (or most of the Founding Fathers) requires little context outside of two readily accessible (to the era) resources: the Bible and classical antiquity. It can be read in a sea-stained letter after a two-month voyage by someone who has never met the writer — yet the full meaning is retained. It is eminently portable, a phrase we often see in programming. Good code is easy to translate into another programming language because it doesn’t rely on context.

There is one famous exception, that of a coder who made context all-powerful: the Story of Mel. But that is also a story of triumph over context; Mel made the machine work in a way that was self-evident to the immensely intelligent, thus frustrating the “suits” who wanted the program to work a certain way. I’ll have to think about that for a while, as a matter of fact.

In one of my earliest online arguments with former friend and current husband-of-burlesque-circus-nipple-play-expert Jonny Lieberman, I snapped at him “WORDS HAVE MEANINGS”. He and his friends laughed, because I sounded so earnest, so naive. Didn’t I know that context was everything? That you could write trash as long as it punched the correct buttons among the audience? That you could simply change what “fast” or “powerful” or “racist” meant based on your feelings of the moment? For years afterwards, he would refer to “WORDS HAVE MEANINGS” on social media with this sort of weapons-grade derision.

Yet I feel myself to have been correct at the time, and correct still. Among civilized men, a word should have an immutable (which is not the same as unchangeable) meaning. Which is where I erred in my other argument with the linguistics professor. He stated that decimate meant to “reduce by a tenth”, after the Roman fashion. I argued that time and custom had changed the meaning to, approximately, “break or destroy into smaller parts”.

Reader, he was right and I was wrong. Then, and now, and forever to come.

Fuck. Ain’t that some shit?