“Academic literary study seems these days to be ninth-rate philosophy, or drunken verbiage without the alcohol. I’d rather listen to my local pub bore than to a paper entitled ‘Open Ended: Poetic Closure and the Digital Interface.’”
The voice is unmistakable: Theodore Dalrymple, in his latest “Global Warning” essay in The Spectator. He pleasingly echoes one of his precursors, George Orwell, in the 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language”:
“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
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