Complexities of language getting lost in the shuffle

House Editorial

Simply put, this editorial is about words. In lieu of a scathing commentary on administrational folly or a monolithic aggrandizement of the Senior Class Challenge committee's gesture of a tempietta to be circumvented by those who traverse the Burruss Hall area, this editorial will simply surround words.

Our language is by unnatural causes becoming increasingly shallow. What once was an abyss of conceptual possibilities is thinning to a muck that collects at the most superficial of levels, decaying in the harsh light of a culture that consumes its information in micro-managed packages.

The visual nature of American society has forced the written word into a degenerative evolution, to become simpler and morecompact at the behest of the visual media whose information is disseminated in 15- second sound bytes. The printed media were forced to evolve in step with image-intensive partners in order to compete. The language had to be tightened and simplified in order to be compatible with the readership's increasingly short attention span.

What is the danger looming in the shadows of this dilution of the prose used in our nation's newspapers? It is simply that if words are not used, they die. The danger lies in the thinning of the conceptual possibilities. Words are enablers of thought; if you limit the tools of thought, you limit the potential for expression itself.

This is not to insinuate the obviously invalid delusion that the print media of the 18th-century read like literary expositions with laborious but expertly crafted prose resembling that of William Faulkner's. The trouble is simply that one merely must peruse the front page of the USA Today to see how simplistic our language is becoming.

To abandon well-mannered restraint and take a carefully trodden journey down the slippery slope, the potential, but admittedly exaggerated, cumulative effect of this shallowing is an Orwellian future for the English language. This genocide of words conjures nightmares of a veritable Newspeak, where conceptualized thought similarly is restrained and homogenized.

If anyone attempts to counteract our language's atrophy, it is the constituents of higher education. It seems that this is the final place where people strive to be daring with language and utilize words that journey past two syllables. The April 15 issue of The Breeze reported the winners of this spring's Write On! contest, a competition of college writing at least partly judged on the basis of "originality in the expression of thesis ..." One only can hope that these writers, those who pride themselves on articulate expression and argument, continue to do so once they have been shaken free of the JMU nest. Perhaps, after leaving the sanctuary for experimental expression, they can clear some of the muck that is collecting and open the way for our language to return to the cool depths at which it once basked.