We Will Fight Them on THEIR Beaches
Neo-neocon with a shout out to Churchill and other wartime orators, with links.
“Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all” was one he followed; he preferred the basic Anglo-Saxon phrases (and I don’t mean curses) to the Latinate whenever possible. As he said:
All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope.*
As I said the other day, Bush’s confident and matter-of-fact delivery of a simple message in his State of the Union address, in a position of growing isolation and opposition, put him in a class with the great wartime orators. Regardless of how many people had a hand in writing it.
* Ironically, most of those are Frog or Latin-based words, with the exception of freedom and hope, which are Germanic. However, all are English now, due to the English-speaking people’s practices of adoption and adapation.
Interested Party in comments notes the Norman invasion’s role in the froggification of our language. The bulk of our language comes from invaders, from Germanic tribes to Normans to Vikings. I can’t think of any off the top of my head that survive in English from older British languages, but I’m all ears if anyone else can. Not counting modern Welsh and Gaelic.
For romance influences of course you have to add Catholicism and the educational standards of the time for a lot of Latin.
Then, there’s the other end of the equation. British imperialism that brought back words like “jungle” and blogging fave “pundit.” Not in common blogging usage ”sahib,” “memsahib,” “baksheesh,” “punkah wallah,” ”babu” and “bazaar,” a bunch of Raj-produced terms we could probably put to good Internet use if we tried.
This was really only going to be about Churchill and good writing practices with a little history thrown in, but now RebeccaH forces me to remember how we’re annoying the French, famously with “Le ‘Amburgeur” or whatever they call it* and “Le Weekend.” Meanwhile delighting and enabling the rest of the world to do business, with widespread use of words, some of which we made up yesterday, such as “Google.”** The central highlands of New Guinea may have several hundred languages that don’t have English influences, but given the spread of pidgin there in the couple of centuries, I doubt it.
An Argentine poet I once knew told me, “Spanish is better for poetry, because it is more beautiful. But English is better for getting things done, because it is more precise.”
The vast and nuanced vocab gives us, in a manner of speaking, the 100 words for snow that the Eskimos or Inuit or Native Alaskans/Canadians, depending on which cultural/political/historical message you want to incorporate, supposedly have.
* ref: who cares? The important thing is that we are driving them insane. And re the Norman invasion, the opening exchange between the peasants in Ivanhoe points out the possibilities of nuanced subversion in English: “What’s English when it is alive and French when it is dead?”
** OK, “Google” was adapted yesterday, but was made up a couple of days before that.
Topics: Uncategorized
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 2:23 pm on Sunday, January 28, 2007
9 Responses to “We Will Fight Them on THEIR Beaches”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
January 28th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Use the words of fallen empires?
Stay the course!
January 28th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Strategy Page Top Ten Mythsof the Iraqi War
January 28th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
OH yeah…via Instapundit
January 28th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Use the words of fallen empires?
Screw the Brits, I’ll take Rome. We’re less than 250 years old, the Romans rocked for well over 500 before they sunk….and it was people like you who sunk them.
January 28th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
Use the words of fallen empires?
Right, that’s the point. Not that they were holding out-by themselves-against a great force of evil in the world or anything.
January 28th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
“Ironically, most of those are Frog or Latin-based words, with the exception of freedom and hope, where are Germanic. However, all are English now, due to the English-speaking people’s practices of adoption and adapation.”
That and the Norman conquest.
January 28th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
I remember a professor who referred to our practice of “spoiling the Egyptians” as a good way to characterize both the English language and culture and by inheritance, American language and culture. Take what’s best, leave the rest.
January 28th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
English is why the French had to create an academy to keep their language “pure”. I’ve been to a lot of different places, and in every one I heard native speakers use English words in place of their more cumbersome native ones. English not only steals from the other languages, it gives back. If every English-speaking (and by extension, American) person in the world vanished tomorrow, our influence would still be felt everywhere for a thousand years.
January 29th, 2007 at 12:31 am
Well said, Rebecca. Hear, hear.