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PARTISAN REVIEW
origin and structure of English are historic and unplanned, English
adapts in a clumsy fashion to the new requirements. Unlike FOR–
TRAN, BASIC or APL, the basic elements and logical relations of
English must now change radically with the program.
If
medicine is
the program, words and grammar may function one way; if law is the
program, another; if business and social work are the software (so to
speak), two other grammars and vocabularies emerge; and so on.
Somehow the ideal of a common language has disintegrated. Since
1945, our educational establishments have assisted this erosion of a
common language ideal in favor of the development of many surro–
gate, utilitarian, and technical sublanguages. Literacy, initially a
broad, common, and versatile achievement with serious personal and
political implications, has turned into a rigid and limiting skill. The
traditional belief that literacy is essential for an effective if not noble
public political life in a democracy has been replaced by the implicit
ideal of literacy as an instrumental, necessary skill in the manipulation
of a narrow range of symbols and structures in order to fulfill special–
ized economic and bureaucratic roles in society. What this linguistic
counterpart to nineteenth-century mechanical standardization achieves
is the increased dependency of the modern individual on social and
economic institutions.
If
one of the concerns of modern life is the
extent to which individuals too often mirror the attitudes, habits, and
character of the world around them and too rarel y develop a sense of
individual identity and character, then the contemporary evolution of
language and literacy reflects and accelerates this process .
Consider this short example of the relationship of the change in
language use to the loss of autonomy. Trials of lay people who are
accused of illegal behavior in financial matters and in personal
behavior show a rise in the defendant's claiming innocence as a result
of having taken the advice of an expert. Despite new laws requiring
clear language in legal documents, this technique gains a new credibil–
ity since the average person's defense now includes the claim that they
did what they did because they did not really understand the language
of the expert and, therefore, what they were advised to do. The ethics of
professions (law, accounting, medicine) notwithstanding, the incom–
prehensibility of a specialized language and the resulting claim of
innocence by the argument of total dependency on, for example, a
lawyer or accountant whose language is alien and incomprehensible
will ring true
to
a jury of lay people. Despite the legal barriers to
claiming ignorance of the laws as a defense, the individual is more
capable than ever of trying to avoid moral and ethical responsibility by
asserting ignorance in the sense of a new kind of illiteracy. Passive
