4 Russell Baker Quotes on Language

Russell Baker quotes on language

16. Americans don't like plain talk anymore. Nowadays they like fat talk. Show them a lean, plain word that cuts to the bone and watch them lard it with thick greasy syllables front and back until it wheezes and gasps for breath as it comes lumbering down upon some poor threadbare sentence like a sack of iron on a swayback horse. 'Facilitate' is typical of the case. A generation ago only sissies and bureaucrats would have said 'facilitate' in public. Nowadays we are a nation of 'facilitate' utterers. 'Facilitate' is nothing more than a gout-ridden, overstuffed 'ease.' Why has 'ease' fallen into disuse among us? It is a lovely little bright snake of a word which comes hissing quietly off the tongue and carries us on, without fuss and French horns, to the object which is being eased. This is English at its very best. Easing is not one of the great events of life; it does not call for Beethoven; it is not an idea to get drunk on, to wallow in, to engage in multiple oleaginous syllabification until it becomes a pompous ass of a word like 'facilitate.'

17. Long words, fat talk - they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?

28. The young cult of sociology, needing a language, invented one. There are many dead languages, but the sociologists' is the only language that was dead at birth.

40. Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.