DICTATORSHIP OF WORDS

Southland Times, Issue 23793, 15 April 1939, Page 14

DICTATORSHIP OF WORDS

USE IN PROPAGANDA ADDRESS BY DOROTHY SAYERS Dorothy Sayers must have depressed the members of the Modern Languages Association by her presidential speech to them at University College on “The Dictatorship of Words,” says a writer in The Manchester Guardian. It was a gloomy picture that she drew for them—a world literate but not educated, in which propaganda took its place with ships, soldiers and aeroplanes as the major weapon. The world in which there existed a vaster public opinion than ever before, but one which forced down the standards of all but the few great writers, who were apt to be starved out or “swamped by the dreadful flow of mediocre nonsense,” a world in which most of what we saw and heard was “illiterate slop prepared for the semi-educated.” She was severe on the Press, though she blamed not it but its readers for its faults. She castigated the misuse of “tragic,” “romance,” “dash,” the inaccurate use of words like “luxurious” for “luxuriant” —“I am tired of reading about people with luxurious hair,” —the second rate in radio and dramatic criticism, in which the honest critic fought a losing battle against “the cocksure mediocrity who flatters the little mind,” and “the little chatty bits of meaningless uplift turned out to please people with the minds of rabbits.”

DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION It. never became quite clear during Miss Sayers’s speech whether she felt so desperate about the whole business as to want to restrain the wordmongers forcibly. There was a significant passage in which she discussed the meanings of words—“democracy,” “freedom,” “education.” “If we mean by democracy,” she said, “the value of the individual man in the scheme of the State, then I think the word stands for something that ought to be cherished. If we mean merely the control of the thinking few by the thoughtless majority, then it is very doubtful where that kind of State is worth preserving. “If we mean by the freedom of the Press that all well-considered opinions should be given a hearing and judged on their merits, well and good. If we mean that every kind of pernicious or merely trivial nonsense should be given encouragement equally with, or more than, that which is beautiful, reasonable or true, then we shall have to ask ourselves whither that kind of freedom is going to lead us. “If we mean by education that everybody should be taught how to think properly, we are setting up a pretty high and certainly desirable ideal. If we mean that everybody should have just enough smattering of letters to put him at the mercy of any quack or demagogue that comes along, we may ask whether an honest ignorance is not preferable.” SUGGESTED REMEDIES These sounded like the ponderings of despair, but Miss Sayers was robust enough when it come to suggesting remedies. If we are not to be at the mercy of words we must learn to control them. The educational authorities must give children a grounding in logic and teach them to detect fallacies, and not to be too much impressed by scientists talking outside their own subjects. As for the rest of us, we are to protest vigorously against the sloppy and second rate whenever we encounter them in book or newspaper or wireless programme. Her final word—she had been quoting from “Alice in Wonderland”—was a warning that “we must j set about finding a way out of the square called ‘Wool and Water,’ to say nothing of the Enchanted Wood where things have no names.” , I