Prema Jayakumar

‘Language,’ said Levis Strauss, ‘is a form of human reason.’ And anyone who loves language and words would agree. How would we think logically without language? Where would we be without the coherence of language? A scary thought.

George Orwell’s 1984 is now rather passé, with the quarter of a century having passed since the date set down in the book without the scary possibilities detailed in it having happened. Autocracies and tyrannical rules have come up in various parts of the world, but have gone under. However, nowadays, one is forced to wonder, if Orwell only got the dates wrong and not the scenario. Big Brother is certainly aware of all your movements, not necessarily by active spying as in the book, not even necessarily with malice, but by the fact that gathering of personal data is now so ubiquitous and so casual we take all those intrusions on our privacy very lightly. If you are connected in any way, if you use any of the social media or even just a telephone and the email, your life is an open book for any agency that is interested enough in you to gather facts about you. So much of life is lived on line, we order food on line, we book tickets for traveling on line, we book rooms to stay in on line. Movie tickets, tickets to other amusements, bank transactions – all are out there for anyone to find if they are interested enough. We used to talk of paper trails, but the trails of this paperless world are so much clearer and well-lighted.

But what is scarier, to me at least, and I guess, to anyone who thinks language has a life of its own, is that language has lost its certainties. Language does not have to mean anything, often does not mean anything, or could mean the opposite of what you thought it meant. Doublespeak, to Orwell in 1984, might have been just the fear in a nightmare, with the torture chamber being named The Palace of Love. But later on in real life, there was a time when ‘a total solution’ meant ‘total extermination’. Those were extreme cases. But Doublespeak is alive and well in the present time in the way we use language every day.

When a lot of knowledge that does not really exist is taken for granted, when an argument is bolstered up by phrases such as ‘it is well known’, or ‘everyone knows’, when deficit of logic is concealed by phrases like ‘of course it is so’, you can be sure that it is a specious piece of information and not to be trusted. And yet, it is said so persuasively that even a cautious reader sails over the information, accepting it as real, accepting the argument, taking it for granted that what is said with so much confidence has to be true.

If one pauses and thinks, one is inclined to say, ‘Stop a moment there, where is it known? Who has said it is true?’, to ask for chapter and verse, but in common discourse and with most of the people already convinced, it is difficult to work up the courage to ask those common sense questions.Rabble rousing speakers, or even those interested in firing up good feelings like patriotism or piety, have always used repeated phrases and high-sounding usages as tools with the sound being more important than the sense. Written language used to be exempt from the indignity of sounding good and meaning nothing, but now that too seems to be lapsing from meaning to meaninglessness. With facts losing their firmness in this post-truth world, what chance has poor language, which is a human construct after all, of surviving scathless?

Juliet can say with confidence ‘That which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.’ But if you call a rose a weed, and say it with confidence a sufficient number of times, it might be removed as a weed.

Orwell, who cared about language, said in one of his essays, ‘Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ One fears that it is not only political language, but the language of ordinary discourse that is being debased so now.