Let's Talk

My wife is a newspaper editor, and yesterday she sent me an Associated Press story – “blog fodder,” she called it -- about the Oxford English Corpus, a massive language research database associated with the Oxford English Dictionary. The database has officially logged its one-billionth English word – an exhilarating and sobering milestone for our language.

The accomplishment calls for clarification, which the Oxford Web site provides: “If all the words in the Oxford English Corpus were laid out end to end (measuring on average 1cm), the total would stretch from London to New York, around 10,000 km. Because the corpus is a collection of texts, there are not one billion different words: the humble word 'the', the commonest in the written language, accounts for 50 million of all the words in the corpus!”

My first response to the news was a swelling sense of pride that I was born into such linguistic bounty. My birthright is the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Johnson, Keats, Dickens, Whitman, Joyce and Beckett. Think of Shakespeare’s brash linguistic confidence, deploying some 17,000 words – about four times the number of a typical, well-educated native speaker. He was so verbally spendthrift (Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII: “And then this `should’ is like a spendthrift sigh,/That hurts by easing.”) Shakespeare could afford to use more than 7,000 words only once – more than appear in the King James version of the Bible. The OED credits him with introducing almost 3,000 words to the language – more than some of today’s college graduates will use in their entire life. Shakespeare had little formal education and lived in an age when English had no dictionaries and the language was fluid and unstable. The first book even resembling a dictionary, A Table Alphabeticall, was compiled by Robert Cawdrey, a schoolmaster, in 1604 – the year Othello was first performed.

We are only one linguistic generation removed from Shakespeare’s English, but high school students with a stunted sense of the potency of language whine about its impenetrability. The basic linguistic principles, however, remain largely unchanged. Some words have dropped from the language, but that difficulty is resolved by intelligent footnotes. I remember learning much English vocabulary by studying Latin – “celerity,” “propinquity” and “sylvan” come to mind – but Shakespeare also made contributions. Reading Romeo and Juliet in 10th grade, I added “jocund” to my repertoire: In Act III, Scene 5, Romeo says, “Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day/Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”

This suggests why the one-billionth-word mark, though exciting, is also depressing. How often do we read a contemporary writer or hear a contemporary speaker employ a vocabulary extending much beyond a few hundred words? In an age of imaginative impoverishment and diminished expectations, for a novelist, poet or politician to write or speak eloquently is to court professional suicide. In the May 11 issue of The New York Review of Books, Russell Baker reviews Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, by Stephen Miller, whose prognosis for good talk is grim. Baker, who largely agrees with Miller’s assessment, writes:

“Many factors unrelated to political fury are working to stop conversation, and some of them go very deep. One is the decline of the love for language and phrasemaking, which used to be as common among the plain people of America as among English majors. People incapable of taking pleasure in expressing themselves are not likely to be much good at conversation.”

So many people, among them cynical politicians who don’t wish to appear uppity in a climate of debased populism, speak in verbal shorthand. “Cool” signifies agreement. “Whatever” implies contemptuous indifference. Pausing to think before speaking, choosing one’s words with care, editing along the way, qualifying, intelligently digressing – all are impatiently dismissed as tedious or elitist. It wasn’t always that way. In his review, Baker describes the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which focused largely on the most contentious issue in American history – slavery – as “one of the best conversations ever heard.”