Anesthesia of the Brain

Why does a good novel have to be luminous? How, exactly, is a poor city gritty? Why must a detail be granular? What’s the difference between a brutal murder and any other murder? Has there ever been a gentle, tender murder? And why do editors let writers get away with this?

Pardon me for bringing this up — but try to stop me.

Why would an editor in her, or his, or its right mind allow a reporter to get away with “usage” instead of use, “utilize” instead of use, and “signage” instead of signs?

Why in God’s name should a professional TV sportscaster, who surely is paid $1 million a year, not be fired for telling us that a big running back picked up some positive yardage?

Why do editors let “impact” into print, when the writer meant “affect”?

Is it because they had high school English teachers who told them, “When your essay is done, turn it in to myself”?

And while we’re at it, what’s the difference between unique and very unique? There is no difference. Absolute terms need not — cannot — be modified.

For this reason, we speak of eternity — not of a long eternity, or a very long eternity, or a uniquely long eternity.

And, please — attorneys, I am talking to you — there is no such thing as moneys. Money is a collective noun. Collective nouns are plural in esse. For example, big ocean waves create foam. They do not create foams. It’s all foam. Just so, a lot of money is not moneys. It’s just money. If you are referring to specie from more than one country, the word is “currencies,” not “moneys.” There is no such thing as moneys.

Also, women are women; they are also female, but they are not “females.”

A corporation, or a government, or men, do not treat females badly; they treat women badly.

Female is an adjective; woman is a noun. A corporation, or a government, can treat a noun (a person, place or thing) badly; it cannot treat an adjective badly.

Actually, allow me to correct myself (not someone else — myself): Our present presidential administration has proved that it is possible to treat adjectives badly: also verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, articles, animals, vegetables and minerals, concepts, precepts, morality, immorality, amorality, science, religion, and much more. Including anteaters.

This administration has reduced politics to slogans, and though this has been done before, never has it been done so crudely, so maliciously and on such a grand scale, with the possible exception of events around the middle of the 20^th century.

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible,” George Orwell wrote in “Politics and the English Language” (1946).

Calling political rhetoric nothing but a “catalogue of swindles and perversions,” Orwell added: “In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

SAD!

No collusion!

“Democrats hate Jewish people.”

Witch hunt!

Orwell again: “Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. 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. … This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases … can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.”

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