A Mouthful of Air

An Egyptian priest….plays up the mystery of language to enhance his own power.

Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

The British…used to regard foreigners as either a comic turn or a sexual menace. To learn a European language…was, at best, to seek to acquire a sort of girls’-finishing-school ornament, at worst, to capitulate feebly to the enemy.

It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.

‘Ass’ for ‘arse’ does not seem to represent a willingness, on British lines, to make the word arhotic; rather it is a puritanical substitution which forces a real ass to become a donkey or burro.

Any kind of discourse which has a flavour of the British ruling class, so powerful is ancestral memory, must be strenuously avoided.

…Australian English may be thought of as a kind of fossilised Cockney of the Dickensian era.

The consciousness in [Australia and New Zealand] of the elevation of a substandard dialect into a national tongue has been responsible for a mixture of attitudes to citizens of the mother country - inferiority, defiance, contempt. A blending of the first two may be responsible for the upward intonation pattern of answers, more appropriate to questions….slang is of its nature defiant. It is also demotic….But the ruling class of Australia is itself demotic.

…slang…the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demotic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.

If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilised discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.

Pornography….the reader panting, eventually masturbating

Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. The questioning of linguistic conventions is one of the main duties of what we call literature.

All art preserves mysteries which aesthetic philosophers tackle in vain.