Subject-Oriented English

SUBJECT ORIENTED ENGLISH

“When every theatre has been replaced by 100 cinemas, when every musical instrument has been replaced by 100 gramophones, when every horse has been replaced by 100cheap motor-cars, when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bed-time stories from a loud speaker, when applied science has done everything possible with the materials on this earth to make life as uninteresting as possible, it will not be surprising if the population of the entire civilized world rapidly follows the fate of the Melanesians.”
–T. S. ELIOT

“In a technological civilization, in a mass society, the individual becomes a depersonalized unit. Things control life. Statistical averages replace qualitative human beings.”
–RADHAKRISHNAN

“Rebirth in other, less industrial stars
where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone
and films, and sleek miraculous motor-cars
and celluloid and rubber are unknown...”
–A. D. HOPE

There is reiterated emphasis on ‘subject-oriented’ English–‘commercial’ English for students of Commerce, ‘scientific’ English for students of Science, ‘arty’ English, perhaps, for students of the Arts. Jargon is one-word definition of subject-oriented English. The pattern of syllabus trains students in the use of jargon. Even among the Arts, teachers talk about Economics English, Maths. English, Politics English and what not! One wonders if there are so many ‘Englishes’ (if the plural is permitted). There is good English; there is bad English–that is all. And ‘subject-oriented’ English or jargon comes under the latter. This emphasis on jargon is guilty of ignoring two basic facts:

(i)                            Subject-oriented English is already there in the texts of the B. Sc. and B. Com. students. Why should good English too be corrupted into this jargon?
(ii)                          It is wrong to presume that a student of Commerce likes only commercial English or a student of Science, Science-biased prose. To think so is a fallacy.

Therefore subject-oriented English is an unnecessary duplication and fruitless superfluity. What this leads to is illustrated by Prof. Weekly in his book on ‘The English Language’:

“A gulf divides the exaltations of the mystics from the tachypraxia of the microsplanchnic hyperthyroidics or the idea-affective dissociations of the schizothymes.” (p. 87) Or consider this quoted by another: “The Erk who was D I-ing the kite did not have a clue and his oppo told him he’d better get weaving or Chieffy would tear a large strip off him. Then Corp came up in a flat spin with the gen that Groupy wanted the kite in an hour. The Erk muttered that he was not carrying the can for anybody, that he wasn’t Joe, that he could not care less about scrambled eggs and that anyway he was browned off.”

Is this the subject-oriented technical language that a student of Science needs? Is this the English we want our students to perpetrate? This is not English but a crime. An essay like Brownowski’s Science and Society or Dean Inge’s Spoon-Feeding which explains how applied Science has ruined man’s faculties is subject-oriented enough and one such is enough for even a student of Science.

Vallins in his Good English has condemned the damage done by jargon: “It is not too much to say that a great deal of teaching in the schools today is rendered vague and sometimes futile by the indirect influence of a jargon which, drifting down from Ministry of Education pamphlets and the educational press, has infected not only the language but also the thought and the method of teachers themselves and of all (including, of course, parents) who are interested in education.” Fowler defines jargon: talk that is considered both ugly-sounding and hard to understand applied especially to the sectional vocabulary of a science, art, class, sect, trade or profession full of technical terms. Jargon, of course, is legitimate and necessary and it enriches, now and then, language. Jargon also means hybrid speech of different languages and woolliness or padding (as Quilter Couch explained in his well-known lecture on jargon). One fears that subject-oriented English is nothing less than ‘talking shop.’ It ‘bores’ the student and fatigues the teacher and deprives both of the legitimate pleasures and enrichment arising out of ‘non-subject-oriented’ studies. Jargon should not replace language and technical lingo should not drive out good English.

This emphasis on subject-oriented English is closely allied to the attitude of the teachers of the various Faculties imagining that they alone are competent to decide the kind of English, the amount of English that their students should have. Everybody seems to be an authority on English nowadays. The universities should tell these non-English Boards and Faculties with courteous bluntness that they are not competent to pontificate about English, that there is a Board of Studies in English to deal with the matter. The various non-English Boards will resent, I am Sure, any interference with their subjects by outsiders. If the Board of Studies in Engineering, in Economics or Maths, or the Sciences legislates about English, then an M. Sc. or a B. E. or an M. A. in Economics can teach English. Why are these Boards for various subjects created? Let the Maths teacher legislate for Engineering and the Engineer for Economics. This is chaos. All this comes out of a lack of humility and an unawareness of ones limitations. Let one stick to ones last. These very attitudes and approaches to language are dangerous fanaticism, dangerous because people do not realize it is fanaticism. Subject-oriented English is a self-defeating attempt:

(a)    It leads to jargon
(b)   It conflicts with cross-disciplinary fertilization
(c)    It ignores the basic fact that a student of Science may be interested in non-subject-oriented English
(d)   It creates a lop-sided intellectual
(e)    It is superfluous because Subject-oriented English is already in their texts.

We forget what Newman stated long ago that a mechanic or an engineer becomes a better mechanic or an engineer because of the liberal education he receives, not because of the utilitarian education he is subjected to. The so-called utilitarian concept of language should go because it is not really utilitarian. Because the emphasis on subject-oriented English stems from wrong thinking about language and narrow thinking about education, this too should have a short shrift for the good of the teacher and the student. Let no educationist or reformer forget the subject-oriented passages cited earlier. The question is: Shall we have a private language or a public language? Unfortunately the reformers seem to opt for a private language. Teachers who had the benefit of a liberal education, that is, a non-subject oriented English, are now denying it blindly to their students out of a mistaken loyalty to the subject; ultimately it will not be deification but dethronement of the subject.

This is a forbidding and foreboding trend. This will ruin the subject and the students’ English. This subject-oriented English

doth posset
And curd, like eager droppings into milk,
The thin and wholesome blood.

The American critic, Lionel Trilling, once remarked, in his book The Liberal Imagination that, in the future, “people will eventually be unable to say, “They fell in love and married”, let alone understand the language of Romeo and Juliet, but will, as a matter of course say, “Their libidinal impulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated them within the same frame of reference.”

In his British Council Pamphlet on Fry Derek Stanford makes the following relevant and illuminating comment:

We may smile at the fate promised us here, but the parody serves to indicate the direction of our thinking as well as of our speech. And that direction, very broadly speaking, is a deterministic one. At the of our thoughts, there rests the supposition that men can be studied and known like things; that history is only extended natural history and the nature is reducible to chemistry and physics. (P. 7) These dogmas and hypotheses fashion the climate of ideas and their constant presence is an obstacle to a more generous and expansive mode of thinking and living. Subject-oriented English or jargon is irresistibly tempting because

(a)    it satisfies a narrow loyalty to a subject
(b)   it is impressive in a learned way.

That is why it is stated in the Prentice Hall Handbook for Writers: “Unfortunately, jargon impresses great many people simply because it sounds involved and learned. We are all reluctant to admit that we do not understand, what we are reading.” (p. 337)  A passage on ‘The Turbo-Encabulator in Industry’ is cited–the linguistic creation of a research engineer who was tired of reading jargon. Jargon is not appropriate for most writing intended for generalreaders. Members of a profession, of course, can use their jargon where they are communicating with one another for it is their language. But it is inappropriate in ‘General’ contexts. Jargon is like lehnwort which should be used only when unavoidable; otherwise it ruins the native grace of General English.

Thus subject-oriented English is linguistically a corruption of language, educationally conflicts with inter-disciplinary approach, psychologically freezes the mobility of interests. This is allied to wrong thinking that the Sciences are everything and everything else nothing. This attitude ruins life too, congeals the genial current of the soul. What follows is the philosophical basis for rejecting the tall claims of the Sciences and the taller claims of subject-oriented English. The false claims for this corruption of language are based on untenable claims for the subject.

It is not often realized that the glorious march of Science has left a trail of mangled and twisted ideas. In these days when people unthinkingly huzza and hep-hep-hurrah the benefits of Science the other side of the coin too should be shown. Dean Inge’s essay Spoon-Feeding points out convincingly how applied Science has rendered man feebler and more effete. Typewriter, for example, drives out calligraphy. Reading does not require brains at all now. Walking and riding are no longer there because of the internal combustion engine. Life is made easy, safe and fool-proof. No demands are made on the energies of youth and Nature is bound to take away any faculty that is not used. Russell’s Modern Homogeneity illustrates the desolating uniformity in the U. S. A. though he debunks undue pessimism on this count. In a Californian orange grove the Garden of Hesperides seems very remote. America is a man-made world and man has made it through machinery. Uniformity is deadly in matters of thought and opinion. And modern inventions make it inevitable–the radio, the cinema, the television. “The machine stamps the words ‘Sunkist’ upon the oranges but otherwise there is nothing to suggest that nature has any part in their production.” From Washington to California, says Russell, the Americans feel the same feelings and think the same thoughts. The benefits of Applied Science like a steam roller macadamize sharp individuality into dead and neat uniformity. There is nothing surprising if a modern poet tells that the verdict of the future on our Age will be: “Asphalt roads and a thousand lost golf balls.” We become spiritual bankrupts. Getting and spending we lay waste our powers, By exploiting the world out of insane greed, lethal curiosity and national rivalries we make this world materially bankrupt. As Huxley said we are wasting the assets of the world, at an alarming rate reducing it to a beggarly planet with empty pockets and emptier inside. We disturb the balance of nature through shouting from housetops about pollution. A statesman has wisely remarked that Ecology is the most polluted word. We destroy the squirrels and the bitter bush dies. The Aswan Dam decreases the fertility of the Nile valley; the insecticides destroy the national bird of the U. S. A.–the bald-headed Eagle. The slogans of the modern man: Applied Science, physical Sciences, Biological Sciences, Democracy have given a wrong twist to man’s thinking.

Democracy excites in us a false idea of equality. Democracy does not mean and should not mean that all men are alike or should be alike. Men are not alike. Even in the animal world there is hierarchy; without a hierarchical set-up the structure of any society is impossible. Democracy can only mean and should only mean equality of opportunities. That is why Shaw says if all men are equal, give the other man a ream of papers and ask him to write the plays I write. A pride of lions and a covey of partridges follow the Feuhrerprinzip.

The physical Sciences induce a false cocksureness that Man can be analysed and measured like things. As Alexis Carrell points out, Man is still the Unknown. To say Man consists of so much water, so much salt, etc., is not to understand him. The analysis of the colour of a woman’s eyes does not explain the magic of those eyes to a lover. A dead rabbit dissected in the laboratory is not the same thing as the live rabbit in its natural habitat and the caged tiger is not the striped terror of the forests. Hence the poet wrote:

The meddling intellect misshapes
The beauteous forms of things
We murder to dissect.

Man is not the subject and victim of the physical laws merely; he is a metaphysical entity. The Biological Sciences starting with Darwin’s monkeying with Man’s ancestry and buttressed by Herbert Spencer’s philosophy fill us with a false hope of never-ending evolution–till we burst like the bull frog which wanted to swell to the size of the bull. The annihilation of Hiroshima should brush away the bright glitter off the moon-landing. Man is still a savage and the man who rolls in a Rolls Royce is as great a scoundrel or a saint as the one who drove a bullock cart. The present world celebrates the funeral of a great Myth. It is absurd to imagine that we go on evolving into higher and greater perfection. As Joad put it, we have the brains of the angels and the behaviour of monkeys. Science asks us to go to the zoo for ancestor worship; in a spiritual sense too we are descended from the monkeys.

It is Applied Science or the birth of the machine that has altered man’s ways of thinking. When a bullock cart is replaced by the motor-car, when the hovel is replaced by the sky scraper, when fire by attrition is replaced by Calgas we imagine we are improving. We know not we are mistaking improved means for improved ends. Old machines replaced by new ones make us imagine that genetically too we are creating revolutions. Adam and Eve eating the apple of knowledge knew not they were eating death. ‘New lamps for old’ cries the magician in the story of Aladdin, ‘new hearts for old’ cry the heart surgeons. Will Science remake man? It is not Science but sense that can remake man–commonsense that is not so common. Unfortunately Science in its blind loyalty and uppishness is driving away sense. Science should rise above the laboratory level. It is not enough to state that the Quark is the latest balloon in physics, that Democritus postulated the atom. It is also necessary to know that Katyayan earlier postulated the atom, that Nagasaki became a heap of rubble in a few seconds. That is why perhaps Faraday when referred to as a great physicist replied indignantly: Call me a philosopher, not a physicist. I think this great statement should be inscribed in golden characters in every Science Gallery.

It is more important to learn the art of living in amity and peace than studying beetles and rocks and reducing the earth to a heap of rocks and a platoon of beetles. Man is the salt of the earth and if the salt loses its savour wherewith can it be salted? With our limited understanding of the Cosmic forces and under-developed hearts we may, avoiding the sting of the Scorpion, get bitten by a snake. With our colossal uppishness and pretensions we may invent ourselves into damnation and modernise ourselves into death. We use the word ‘modern’ not realising our shallowness and folly. How are we the absolute standard to judge the past or shape the future? As a great scholar branded it, ‘modern’ is an arrogant word. Of course the past cannot retort but the future may say: What blind and pitiful boasters these? What fools these mortals be–of the 20th century? And the past and the future may laugh in unison and perhaps have sympathy at our follies. Charity and humility alone can save us, not these postures of uppishness and gestures of arrogance.

What saves the world is the attitude in
The malice towards you to forgive you. Live,
And deal with others better.

or

The rarer action is
In virtue that in vengeance.

Civilization is not jumbo jets or recoilless guns. It is Ceremony, Degree or Concord. Otherwise:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

If language is interfered with, say the linguists, something more than language is at stake. Subject-oriented English ruins English, ruins the subject, ruins a way of life and thinking.