ALAN writes:

In the years 1966-’70, I made the remarkable discovery (remarkable to one 16 years old) that some doctors were liars, as were some pharmacologists, some hospitals, and some departments of government. In some of those years I was in high school. But I did not learn those things in high school. I learned them in spite of high school.

I also discovered that whereas “nice” people did not themselves originate such lies, they agreed nonetheless to accept them and repeat them and almost never bothered to challenge them or oppose them.

There it was, in plain sight:  Professional mendacity in the former; widespread credulity or mindlessness or evasion in the latter. The first was bad enough, I thought. But the second was even worse.

Over the intervening fifty years, the lies have increased, along with a population who are delighted to be entertained and deceived by such lies.

By the early 1970s I had begun to become aware of the importance of words in constructing and promoting such lies. It was my habit in those years to browse often in book and magazine departments in the Famous-Barr and Stix, Baer & Fuller department stores in downtown St. Louis.

One day in 1973 while doing so, my eye fell upon the words “The Plight of the American Language” on the cover of Saturday Review/World magazine. I purchased the magazine for 75 cents. It is in front of me today as I write these words.  I had discovered gold within in the form of a four-page essay by novelist and short-story writer Jean Stafford, who was quite untrendy and whose name I predict none of your readers will recognize.

The American language, she wrote, was beset with neologisms and “has had its parts of speech broken to smithereens: Setting the fractures and dislocations has been undertaken by tinkers with tin ears they have fashioned for themselves out of old applesauce cans; and verbs are used as nouns and nouns are used as verbs….and upon its stooped and aching back it carries an astounding burden of lumber piled on by the sociologists and the psychologists and the sociopsychologists and the psychosociologists….”  [Saturday Review/World, Dec. 4, 1973, p. 14]

She did not live long enough to see that “progressives” and Marxist change agents would add to that burden years later with such absurdities as “diversity”, “inclusion”, and “woke-ism”.

The heehaws of donkeys in the pasture across the road from her home were more sensible, she wrote, than the idiotic neologisms and gibberish that Americans, both “Liberals” and “Conservatives”, were agreeing to accept into their vocabulary. Her assessment of “lifestyle” and “Ms.” and “meaningful dialogue” was that they were abominations.

Those judgments alone endeared her to me. Here in this tiny woman who was fond of cats, liquor, and cigarettes and who suffered numerous health setbacks late in her life, I knew I had found a moral-philosophical ally in my opposition to pretentious jargon, professional mendacity, non-words, idiot-words, and anti-concepts.

Many years later and long after she died, I learned that she had felt as alienated as I did from what American life was becoming in the late 1960s. She loathed policies of appeasement to college “students” who demanded the license to choose what and how teachers would teach. She excoriated The New York Times for “its wholehearted participation in the debasement of the English language”.

In an interview she said:  “…what I’d like to call myself is not a conservative, but a conservationist.  I want to preserve everything that is good, dignified, and that is an adornment to the country, including the language.”

The youth subculture of the 1960s did not impress her. “The direct appeal to youth for youth’s sake,” she said, will always be the making of just so many little dictators. “They love nobody but themselves and their cry is I want mine!” – judgments that recall Richard Weaver’s remarks (in Visions of Order, 1964) about Americans’ uncritical adulation of their young.

Decades before Lawrence Auster’s notable essay “The Breakdown of Western Form” [View from the Right, Nov. 22, 2002 ], Jean Stafford wrote in favor of manners, traditions, form and formality over and against the casual, feel-good, pseudo-friendly informality that was beginning to take hold in American public life in the 1960s and is now ubiquitous, all standards in such things having been dumbed down likely beyond anything she could have imagined.

She also wrote firmly in defense of the family: “The structure of the family, of whom the woman is the architect, has been weakened to the point of debility….  Nothing obliges us to love our parents or our cousins; and, so far as I know, no authority has ever proposed we like them; but, plainly, the individual must be nurtured within an edifice, within a form.”

She was never more right than when she opposed the vocabulary of medicine replacing the vocabulary of morality, even though I believe she underestimated the degree and enthusiasm with which most Americans would accept that substitution. She was not impressed by the claim that rule-breakers, lawbreakers, and liars were “sick,” and that was to her credit. Had she thought more about it, she may have asked:  If a “sick mind” can be “treated” with drugs—as psychiatrists and other doctors claim—then why can’t a “broken heart” be repaired by heart surgery?

But she knew that the absurdity of such claims is made possible only by our betrayal of the integrity of words and by our deference to professional racketeers who encourage gullibility, not careful thought.
If she were here today, she would see how “Fem Lib” mayors and governors now routinely ignore the law’s responsibility to punish lawbreakers and talk instead about how they want to enlist “behavioral science” to deal with lawbreakers. There is of course no such thing as “behavioral science;” it is code for increasing the power of The State on the basis of non-objective law, a guarantee of tyranny worse than any of those in history.

Worse than that: Americans’ typical response to such “behavioral science” rhetoric is silent acquiescence. Observe how few voices we hear in opposition to that rhetoric and in defense of traditional law enforcement based on objective standards and fixed penalties not subject to the self-serving whims of “behavioral scientists” and allied do-gooders.

Wholly at odds with modern trendiness, Jean Stafford wanted libraries to remain “dignified asylums” where people could read, write, and think in quiet settings, rather than “multi-media” centers of commotion and busyness.

Had she been clairvoyant, I imagine she would have been content to die years before the advent of computers and the Internet, the wholesale across-the-culture surrender of standards, and the destruction of opportunities for thought, contemplation, and disciplined writing by the cell phone and around-the-clock electronic amusement and distraction.

I like to imagine how she would excoriate younger generations who cannot speak a single coherent sentence, who communicate in telegraph-ese on tiny screens at which they stare ceaselessly, who take pride in shredding all traditional rules of grammar, punctuation, and spelling, and whose entire vocabulary consists of “awesome,” “cool,” “actually,” “really,” “literally,” “just,” “no problem,” and perhaps eight or ten more non-words, weasel-words, or brain-anesthetizing slogans.

With her acute sensitivity to gaffes in spoken and written English, I imagine she would have been delighted to have lived and died years before Americans agreed to recite imbecilities like “transgender,” “actualize their potential,” “differently-abled,” “infrastructure,” and “physically-challenged.” Where, I imagine her asking, is the extrastructure? And how about all those people who are metaphysically-challenged?

And what glorious opportunities for debunking she would have found in the parallel plagues of “was like” (as in “I was like,” “he was like,” “she was like,” “it was like,” and “they were like”), and “need to” (as in “You need to” and “I need you to.”)

I believe she would argue that people who agree to speak as clumsily and sloppily as that are not likely to recognize the deliberate misuse by governments of words with a patina of medical/scientific authority (like virus and vaccine) for diabolical political purposes.

Along with Edwin Newman, Russell Baker, John Simon, Dr. Thomas Szasz, Professor Richard Mitchell, and in later years, Lawrence Auster and Dr. Thomas Bertonneau, Jean Stafford was one of a vanishing tribe of Americans who knew that respect for language and the disciplined use of words are essential for clear thought and moral confidence.

Where are their moral-philosophical counterparts today?

— Comments —

Michael DeLoatch writes:

I wanted to write and thank you and your correspondent Alan for his frequent contributions to your site.  Clearly we are kindred spirits in despising the cultural rot of our putative civilization, whose rate of palpable debasement we have watched accelerate during our own lifetimes. Most insulting of all is the pernicious insinuation one may read often that this is all just the natural course of things and a wholly organic decay.  None of this would have been possible I believe without the appropriation of modern technology by purposeful agents of evil and the acquiescence of slowly-boiled frogs.

Yet to find a small sliver of silver lining in THE CLOUD, I would call attention to the presence of the cited Jean Stafford article on the Unz website which I look forward to reading today in its entirety.  Although I find the fare on Unz’s primary website a contrived, coarse lampoon of conservatism that attracts vulgar commentary like ants to a picnic, nevertheless I think his effort to archive past periodical content is laudable.

I also enjoyed being reminded by Alan’s piece today of John Simon, Russell Baker and Edwin Newman.  I used to delight in reading their yeoman’s struggles against erosion of the English tongue.  Perhaps if I had spent less time with my nose pressed into newspapers, magazines and books back then, and more time with my brain addled by a cathode ray tube like my peers, I wouldn’t feel a stranger in 2021?

Each time I read his stuff, I’m like, Alan should start his own magazine or something, right? LOL.  Or at least get a twitter.

Laura writes:

Thanks for writing.

I agree. Alan’s literally awesome. : – )

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