distinctions

I finally decided to pick myself up by the bootstraps and claim my place as a student of English Literature, which is a lot harder than it sounds. As soon as you take on the name of English Major, people begin to assume you have read certain canonical works of literature… and it’s really embarrassing to say No, I haven’t read that actually. It’s the same shame incurred by a self-declared Child of the 90s who has to admit No, I didn’t really know what Pokémon was until this semester.

Anyway, I hadn’t read any of the classic dystopian literature (1984, A Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451), and that needed to change… so I went for the first.

Let me tell you, 1984 is all kinds of weird and scary. I hate being watched; in fact, if my mother (whom I love and trust) were to be standing behind my back any closer than 3 feet away, I would probably be unable to type any words at all, which is silly because this is not exactly life-shattering stuff… I just like privacy.

I also hate TVs; in fact, after a week in a hotel with my family this winter with two TVs constantly on in the background making noise, I swore that I would never own a TV at all if I could help it… I just like silence. Both privacy and silence being denied me through the perspective of Winston Smith, it was difficult for me to enjoy living through his perspective for the hours I spent in the book.

Maybe the only element to 1984 I did find really intriguing/potentially relevant is Newspeak—the language of Oceania. One of the engineers of this language confronts Winston,

In your heart you’d rather stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year? …The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

My mind went immediately to a book I read in high school, called Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith & Art, by Madeleine L’Engle. so. good. She says,

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.
…If our vocabulary dwindles to a few shopworn words, we are setting ourselves up for takeover by a dictator. When language becomes exhausted, our freedom dwindles—we cannot think; we do not recognize danger; injustice strikes us as no more than ‘the way things are.’

She never mentions 1984, but it’s exactly the same issue. They say you only have memory as far back as you knew words to describe whatever it is you’re remembering… without words, you cannot grasp a thought or feeling even enough to recall it a few years later. Without words, experiences are nebulous nothings.

Even more dangerous, though, is very few words. When you get past infancy and discover language, you can start to really feel things, and grasp those feelings. But if your vocabulary never expanded past first grade, and neither did anyone else’s? I doubt you’d be able to know and grasp feelings of despondency or elation… at least, you couldn’t differentiate between them and disappointment or any mild pleasure. It’s all sadness and happiness. And it limits not only your communication, but your experience—because soon, you will forget that there is a difference between amusement and joy, diversion and enthrallment. These distinctions are necessary to full humanity. And if we aren't fully human... well yeah, what's to keep a dictator at bay? What thoughts might we have to keep private? What would we do with silence if we couldn't think?

In one of the ESL classes I’m observing, Reading & Writing III, the professor has been challenging the students to use words. Lots of them. ‘Good,’ ‘nice,’ and ‘thing’ have all gone on the I Had Better Not See This Word list. When we moved beyond ‘good,’ we could discuss the ‘shades of meaning’ between pleasant, profitable, and positive.

Some students are learning English words for concepts they don’t even have in their language. It’s amazing to see these adults’ minds open up to thoughts and feelings that weren’t even options for them to think and feel before. I wonder what my inner life is missing out on because I can’t name it.


BONUS ANSWER: thanks to the fabulous KMax, I give you 38 Wonderful Foreign Words We Could Use in English