SUBJECT ORIENTED ENGLISH
PROF.
K. VISWANATHAM
“When
every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument
has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100
cheap motor-cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every
child to hear its bed-time stories from a loud speaker, when applied science
has done everything possible with the materials on this earth
to make life as uninteresting as possible, it will not be surprising if the
population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows
the fate of the Melanesians.”
–T. S. ELIOT
“In
a technological civilization, in a mass society, the individual becomes a
depersonalized unit. Things control life. Statistical averages replace
qualitative human beings.”
–RADHAKRISHNAN
“Rebirth
in other, less industrial stars
where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone
and films, and sleek miraculous motor-cars
and celluloid and rubber are unknown...”
–A.
D. HOPE
There
is reiterated emphasis on ‘subject-oriented’ English–‘commercial’ English for
students of Commerce, ‘scientific’ English for students of Science, ‘arty’
English, perhaps, for students of the Arts. Jargon is one-word definition of
subject-oriented English. The pattern of syllabus trains students in
the use of jargon. Even among the Arts, teachers talk about Economics English, Maths. English, Politics English and what not!
One wonders if there are so many ‘Englishes’ (if the
plural is permitted). There is good English; there is bad English–that is all.
And ‘subject-oriented’ English or jargon comes under the latter. This emphasis
on jargon is guilty of ignoring two basic facts:
(i)
Subject-oriented English is already there
in the texts of the B. Sc. and B. Com. students. Why
should good English too be corrupted into this jargon?
(ii)
It is wrong to presume that a student of
Commerce likes only commercial English or a student of Science, Science-biased
prose. To think so is a fallacy.
Therefore
subject-oriented English is an unnecessary duplication and fruitless
superfluity. What this leads to is illustrated by Prof. Weekly in his book on
‘The English Language’:
“A
gulf divides the exaltations of the mystics from the tachypraxia
of the microsplanchnic hyperthyroidics
or the idea-affective dissociations of the schizothymes.”
(p. 87) Or consider this quoted by another: “The Erk
who was D I-ing the kite did not have a clue and his oppo told him he’d better get weaving or Chieffy would tear a large strip off him. Then Corp came up
in a flat spin with the gen that Groupy
wanted the kite in an hour. The Erk muttered that he
was not carrying the can for anybody, that he wasn’t Joe, that he could not
care less about scrambled eggs and that anyway he was browned off.”
Is
this the subject-oriented technical language that a student of Science needs?
Is this the English we want our students to perpetrate? This is not English but
a crime. An essay like Brownowski’s Science and
Society or Dean Inge’s Spoon-Feeding which explains
how applied Science has ruined man’s faculties is subject-oriented enough and
one such is enough for even a student of Science.
Vallins in his Good
English has condemned the damage done by jargon: “It is not too much to say
that a great deal of teaching in the schools today is rendered vague and
sometimes futile by the indirect influence of a jargon which, drifting down
from Ministry of Education pamphlets and the educational press, has infected
not only the language but also the thought and the method of teachers
themselves and of all (including, of course, parents) who are interested in
education.” Fowler defines jargon: talk that is considered both ugly-sounding
and hard to understand applied especially to the sectional vocabulary of a
science, art, class, sect, trade or profession full of technical terms. Jargon,
of course, is legitimate and necessary and it enriches, now and then, language.
Jargon also means hybrid speech of different languages and woolliness or
padding (as Quilter Couch explained in his well-known
lecture on jargon). One fears that subject-oriented English is nothing less
than ‘talking shop.’ It ‘bores’ the student and fatigues the
teacher and deprives both of the legitimate pleasures and enrichment arising
out of ‘non-subject-oriented’ studies. Jargon should not replace
language and technical lingo should not drive out good English.
This
emphasis on subject-oriented English is closely allied to the attitude of the
teachers of the various Faculties imagining that they alone are competent to
decide the kind of English, the amount of English that their students should
have. Everybody seems to be an authority on English nowadays. The universities
should tell these non-English Boards and Faculties with courteous bluntness
that they are not competent to pontificate about English, that there is a Board
of Studies in English to deal with the matter. The various non-English Boards
will resent, I am Sure, any interference with their subjects by outsiders. If
the Board of Studies in Engineering, in Economics or Maths,
or the Sciences legislates about English, then an M. Sc. or a B. E. or an M. A.
in Economics can teach English. Why are these Boards for various subjects
created? Let the Maths teacher legislate for
Engineering and the Engineer for Economics. This is chaos. All this comes out
of a lack of humility and an unawareness of ones limitations. Let one stick to
ones last. These very attitudes and approaches to language are dangerous
fanaticism, dangerous because people do not realize it is
fanaticism. Subject-oriented English is a self-defeating attempt:
(a)
It leads to jargon
(b)
It conflicts with cross-disciplinary
fertilization
(c)
It ignores the basic fact that a student
of Science may be interested in non-subject-oriented English
(d)
It creates a lop-sided intellectual
(e)
It is superfluous because
Subject-oriented English is already in their texts.
We
forget what Newman stated long ago that a mechanic or an engineer becomes a
better mechanic or an engineer because of the liberal education he receives,
not because of the utilitarian education he is subjected to. The so-called
utilitarian concept of language should go because it is not really utilitarian.
Because the emphasis on subject-oriented English stems from wrong thinking
about language and narrow thinking about education, this too should have a
short shrift for the good of the teacher and the student. Let no educationist
or reformer forget the subject-oriented passages cited earlier. The question
is: Shall we have a private language or a public language? Unfortunately the reformers
seem to opt for a private language. Teachers who had the benefit of a liberal
education, that is, a non-subject oriented English,
are now denying it blindly to their students out of a mistaken loyalty to the
subject; ultimately it will not be deification but dethronement of the subject.
This is a forbidding and foreboding trend. This will ruin the subject and the students’ English. This subject-oriented English
doth posset
And
curd, like eager droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood.
The
American critic, Lionel Trilling, once remarked, in his book The Liberal
Imagination that, in the future, “people will eventually be unable to say,
“They fell in love and married”, let alone understand the language of Romeo
and Juliet, but will, as a matter of course say, “Their libidinal impulses
being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated
them within the same frame of reference.”
In
his British Council Pamphlet on Fry Derek Stanford makes the following relevant
and illuminating comment:
We
may smile at the fate promised us here, but the parody serves to indicate the
direction of our thinking as well as of our speech. And that direction, very
broadly speaking, is a deterministic one. At the back of our thoughts, there
rests the supposition that men can be studied and known like things; that
history is only extended natural history and the nature is reducible to
chemistry and physics. (P. 7) These dogmas and
hypotheses fashion the climate of ideas and their constant presence is an
obstacle to a more generous and expansive mode of thinking and living.
Subject-oriented English or jargon is irresistibly tempting because
(a)
it satisfies a narrow loyalty to a
subject
(b)
it
is impressive in a learned way.
That
is why it is stated in the Prentice Hall Handbook for Writers: “Unfortunately,
jargon impresses great many people simply because it sounds involved and
learned. We are all reluctant to admit that we do not understand, what we are
reading.” (p. 337) A
passage on ‘The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry’ is
cited–the linguistic creation of a research engineer who was tired of reading
jargon. Jargon is not appropriate for most writing intended for general readers.
Members of a profession, of course, can use their jargon
where they are communicating with one another for it is their language. But it
is inappropriate in ‘General’ contexts. Jargon is like lehnwort
which should be used only when unavoidable; otherwise it
ruins the native grace of General English.
Thus
subject-oriented English is linguistically a corruption of language,
educationally conflicts with inter-disciplinary approach, psychologically
freezes the mobility of interests. This is allied to wrong thinking that the
Sciences are everything and everything else nothing. This attitude ruins life
too, congeals the genial current of the soul. What follows is the philosophical
basis for rejecting the tall claims of the Sciences and the taller claims of
subject-oriented English. The false claims for this corruption of language are
based on untenable claims for the subject.
It
is not often realized that the glorious march of Science has left a trail of
mangled and twisted ideas. In these days when people unthinkingly huzza and hep-hep-hurrah the benefits of Science the other side of
the coin too should be shown. Dean Inge’s
essay Spoon-Feeding points out convincingly how applied Science has
rendered man feebler and more effete. Typewriter, for example, drives
out calligraphy.
Democracy
excites in us a false idea of equality. Democracy does not mean and should not
mean that all men are alike or should be alike. Men are not alike. Even in the
animal world there is hierarchy; without a hierarchical set-up the structure of
any society is impossible. Democracy can only mean and should only mean
equality of opportunities. That is why Shaw says if all men are equal, give the
other man a ream of papers and ask him to write the plays I write. A pride of
lions and a covey of partridges follow the Feuhrerprinzip.
The
physical Sciences induce a false cocksureness that Man can be analysed and measured like things. As Alexis Carrell points out, Man is still the Unknown. To say Man
consists of so much water, so much salt, etc., is not to understand him. The
analysis of the colour of a woman’s eyes does not
explain the magic of those eyes to a lover. A dead rabbit dissected in the
laboratory is not the same thing as the live rabbit in its natural habitat and
the caged tiger is not the striped terror of the forests. Hence the poet wrote:
The
meddling intellect misshapes
The
beauteous forms of things
We
murder to dissect.
Man is not the subject and victim of the physical laws merely; he is a metaphysical entity. The Biological Sciences starting with Darwin’s monkeying with Man’s ancestry and buttressed by Herbert Spencer’s philosophy fill us with a false hope of never-ending evolution–till we burst like the bull frog which wanted to swell to the size of the bull. The annihilation of Hiroshima should brush away the bright glitter off the moon-landing. Man is still a savage and the man who rolls in a Rolls Royce is as great a scoundrel or a saint as the one who drove a bullock cart. The present world celebrates the funeral of a great Myth. It is absurd to imagine that we go on evolving into higher and greater perfection. As Joad put it, we have the brains of the angels and the behaviour of monkeys. Science asks us to go to the zoo for ancestor worship; in a spiritual sense too we are descended from the monkeys.
It
is Applied Science or the birth of the machine that has altered man’s ways of
thinking. When a bullock cart is replaced by the motor-car, when the hovel is
replaced by the sky scraper, when fire by attrition is replaced by Calgas we imagine we are improving. We know not we are
mistaking improved means for improved ends. Old machines replaced by new ones
make us imagine that genetically too we are creating revolutions. Adam and Eve
eating the apple of knowledge knew not they were eating death. ‘New lamps for
old’ cries the magician in the story of Aladdin, ‘new hearts for old’ cry the
heart surgeons. Will Science remake man? It is not Science but sense that can
remake man–commonsense that is not so common. Unfortunately Science in its
blind loyalty and uppishness is driving away sense.
Science should rise above the laboratory level. It is not enough to state that
the Quark is the latest balloon in physics, that Democritus
postulated the atom. It is also necessary to know that Katyayan
earlier postulated the atom, that Nagasaki became a heap of rubble in a few
seconds. That is why perhaps Faraday when referred to as a great physicist
replied indignantly: Call me a philosopher, not a physicist. I think this great
statement should be inscribed in golden characters in every Science Gallery.
It
is more important to learn the art of living in amity and peace than studying
beetles and rocks and reducing the earth to a heap of rocks and a platoon of
beetles. Man is the salt of the earth and if the salt loses its savour wherewith can it be salted? With our limited
understanding of the Cosmic forces and under-developed hearts we may, avoiding
the sting of the Scorpion, get bitten by a snake. With our colossal uppishness and pretensions we may invent ourselves into
damnation and modernise ourselves into death. We use
the word ‘modern’ not realising our shallowness and
folly. How are we the absolute standard to judge the past or shape the future?
As a great scholar branded it, ‘modern’ is an arrogant word. Of course the past
cannot retort but the future may say: What blind and pitiful boasters these?
What fools these mortals be–of the 20th century? And the past and the
future may laugh in unison and perhaps have sympathy at our
follies. Charity and humility alone can save us, not these postures of uppishness and gestures of arrogance.
What
saves the world is the attitude in
The
malice towards you to forgive you. Live,
And
deal with others better.
or
The
rarer action is
In
virtue that in vengeance.
Civilization
is not jumbo jets or recoilless guns. It is Ceremony, Degree or Concord.
Otherwise:
Things
fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The
ceremony of innocence is drowned
The
best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are
full of passionate intensity.
If
language is interfered with, say the linguists, something more than language is
at stake. Subject-oriented English ruins English, ruins the subject, ruins a
way of life and thinking.