Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgment
- Abbreviations and Editions Cited
- Introduction
- Part I The American Logocracy: The Nexus of Word and Act
- Part II Political and Linguistic Corruption: The Ideological Inheritance
- Part III The American Language of Revolution and Constitutional Change
- Part IV From Logomachy to Civil War: The Politics of Language in Post-Revolutionary America
- 9 The Unsettled Language: Schoolmasters vs. Truants
- 10 Corrupt Language and a Corrupt Body Politic, or the Disunion of Words and Things
- 11 Sovereign Words vs. Representative Men
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
10 - Corrupt Language and a Corrupt Body Politic, or the Disunion of Words and Things
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgment
- Abbreviations and Editions Cited
- Introduction
- Part I The American Logocracy: The Nexus of Word and Act
- Part II Political and Linguistic Corruption: The Ideological Inheritance
- Part III The American Language of Revolution and Constitutional Change
- Part IV From Logomachy to Civil War: The Politics of Language in Post-Revolutionary America
- 9 The Unsettled Language: Schoolmasters vs. Truants
- 10 Corrupt Language and a Corrupt Body Politic, or the Disunion of Words and Things
- 11 Sovereign Words vs. Representative Men
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture
Summary
Anselmo
We are a nation of word-killers: hero, veteran, tragedy, – Watch the great words go down.
CarlThe language grows like that.
Anselmo
At least, it changes.
RicardoCorruption, too, is a kind of development – it depends on the view-point. It depends on whether
You are the word, or the worm; and whose is the ultimate society.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Conversation at Midnight”Emerson's dictum in Nature – “The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language” – is a commonplace (ELA, 22). George Marsh in Lectures on the English Language offers a variant of the commonplace that reorders the relationship Emerson posits: “The depravation of a language is not merely a token or an effect of the corruption of a people, but corruption is accelerated, if not caused by the perversion and degradation of its consecrated vocabulary” (ML, 647). The corruption Emerson describes merely affects the language: “new imagery ceases to be created” and “words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.” The corruption Marsh describes is more ominous in its consequences: “Every human speech has its hallowed dialect, its nomenclature appropriated to the service of sacred things, the conscience, the generous affections, the elevated aspirations, without which humanity is not a community of speaking men, but a herd of roaring brutes” (ibid.). The corruption of language is followed by a return to violence and anarchy – to civil war. Marsh published his lectures in 1859.
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- Information
- Representative WordsPolitics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1865, pp. 348 - 371Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993