Language

I'm currently reading C.S. Lewis' extremely thought-provoking and challenging book The Abolition of Man. The following, on page 45, resonated with the 'writer' in me, while I was reading it during breakfast just now (it was all in one paragraph, but I have decided to split it to make reading easier):

---------------------------------------------------
A theorist about language may approach his native tongue, as it were from the outside, regarding its genius as a thing that has no claim on him and advocating wholesale alterations of its idiom and spelling in the interests of commercial convenience or scientific accuracy.

That is one thing.

A great poet, who has 'loved, and been well nurtured in, his mother tongue', may also make great alterations in it, but his changes of the language are made in the spirit of the language itself: he works from within. The language which suffers, has also inspired the changes.

That is a different thing--as different as the works of Shakespeare are from Basic English. It is the difference between alteration from within and alteration from without: between the organic and surgical.
---------------------------------------------------

As a student and teacher of English, I am appalled by the state of the language as expressed in various reference books lining the bookshelves of stores and schools, where it is treated as something mechanical, to be 'worked upon' and understood in an empiric sense, without any love for the language being required in the least.

As a writer and reader of English literature, I am appalled by the lack of spontaneity, raw idea and emotion, especially in classrooms, and the virtual absence of appreciation for the language amongst the general public, who are content reading manufactured works geared for nothing more than the Bestsellers List.

We have become superficial, as Richard Foster pronounced in the very first line of his book Celebration of Discipline. In our so-called 'depth of understanding,' and in the presence of the innumerable dissected corpses of art, language and science, we have lost that one crucial element that makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts: love.


p.s. I had thought this post didn't make it, so I re-typed the whole thing about three times again, each time accidentally deleting it. And now I find it posted up. Argh... Patience is truly the virtue of the blogger, and I really must learn this. As Sivin says, blogging is a discipline.