““But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” ”
I’ve been fascinated by language and meaning for as long as I can remember. However, it is only recently that I became conscious of how that is evidenced by the books I read.
1984, by George Orwell, from which I’ve quoted above, is an obvious choice. Restrict language, and you restrict thought. That much is obvious, and in the novel 1984 it was a deliberate policy on the part of the government.
But restrictions in language can also happen “naturally”, so to speak. Back in the 1970s when I was training to be a teacher we learnt of the work of Bernstein, who researched into “restricted” and “elaborated” codes of speaking. The former is less explanatory, as it relies on insider knowledge to understand all the nuances. Elaborated code, on the other hand, would easily be able to be understood by an eavesdropper. However, and this is where it was supposed to apply to our training as teachers, Bernstein associated restricted code with working class people, and elaborated code with middle class people, because of “the conditions in which they were raised and the socialisation process.”
Personally, I find this highly insulting, not least because it is such a huge generalisation, but the long and short of it is that a person with a restricted code in speech is probably going to have fewer life chances that someone with an elaborated code of speech, because they have a more restricted bank of words and concepts to draw on. At least, that is my interpretation, and I’ll return to this in a moment.
Thus we were taught that a working class parent is likely to say to their child, “Shut up”, whereas a middle class person is more likely to say “We are hoping to catch the 9pm news, so would you mind not talking for a few minutes? There’s a dear.”
I remember asking: so what if a child in your class is talking, and you’re not sure whether to use the restricted code or the elaborated code when asking him to be quiet? The tutor said he wasn’t sure, so suggested, jokingly, that perhaps you should say “Shut up please.”.
Since that lecture I have hardly thought about restricted and elaborated codes of speech, except on a few occasions.
One such occasion was when I was thinking about a girl I taught. She was highly intelligent, very helpful and had a great sense of humour. Unfortunately, though, whenever she disagreed with somebody she immediately flew into a temper, insulted them and told them to go forth and multiply — though rather more crudely than that. I imagine she has a huge following on Twitter these days, as that seems to be the main way of “communicating” for a lot of people.
I was also thinking about current attempts by people — people who have enjoyed the benefits of a good education — to adopt measures that would restrict others’ access to classic works of literature and therefore, in my opinion, to allusions and therefore lead, ultimately, to a restricted bank of concepts and words to draw on.
For example, in The Go-Between, someone insults someone else by calling them Shylock. I recognised that as an antisemitic term of abuse because I’ve read and seen Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Will someone who reads Morpego’s book of Shakespeare’s tales, which omits The Merchant of Venice because of its antisemitism, understand that reference?
I recently bought a book called The Language of the Third Reich, by Victor Klemperer. He kept a record of how the German language was changed (restricted) day by day. In one chapter he writes:
“New words keep turning up, or old ones acquire new meanings, or new combinations are formed which rapidly ossify into stereotypes.”
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We are seeing this now, in our own era, and I find it quite disturbing, not to say depressing. If the meaning of certain terms has changed, then we have fewer means with which to have a reasonable discussion with other people. It sometimes feels to me that we’re trying to maintain stability on shifting sand.
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