The Irony of a Sophisticated Lexicon - Aravindh S. Baskar, Wilson’s School

As a philosophy student, I get the opportunity of reading many original texts of influential philosophers, to understand their points of view and theories. Of course, this is one of the main reasons some people wish to study philosophy, to see the world through the eyes of figures such as Plato, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. However, upon reading them only one thought crossed my mind: ‘this is completely inaccessible’. The language these men used made it so that it was extremely difficult to clearly understand what their point was as a layman. Surely this defeats the entire purpose of their writing of these texts. For example, Jeremy Bentham in his principle of utility states “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure…In other words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality, he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law.” As a class, when we read this text there was a consensus of confusion and lack of understanding of his fundamental point. The onus of this confusion lay fully in the language Bentham used to convey his ideas. The exercise that followed helped to clear any confusion through the use of dictionaries to break this down into more understandable English (i.e. English we could use to explain this to Year 7s with). ‘Naturally, two things guide humans, pain and pleasure. A man may pretend to reject being under their control but really he will be anyway. Etc” Why would Bentham write in this level of language when conveying ideas that he believed every human ought to adhere to. Surely it is in everyone’s interest for Bentham to write in a language that could be understood by everyone, as in Bentham’s eyes everyone should follow his principles. The primary reason for this would have been Bentham’s audience. In 1800 around 40 per cent of males and 60 per cent of females [1]in England and Wales were illiterate so his limited audience would’ve primarily consisted of academics who wrote and read at that sophisticated level and would have looked down upon lower levels of English. As such a high proportion of the population were illiterate, Bentham did not have to consider the understanding of the masses as they would not have had access to this material regardless. This was the general trend of Bentham and his contemporaries, writing material that was not regarded to be for the majority of the population. By 2000 the number changed to only 1% in the UK being legally classed as illiterate. Although this drastic change to literacy rates in the preceding 2 centuries would theoretically lead to all written material being accessible to everyone in contemporary society, in reality, the language used in literature and elsewhere still seems to divide the country. In 2021 the average GCSE grade in English language and literature lies between 4.9 and 5.1. Where only 2.8% of students nationwide are achieving grade 9, which is a 0.3% increase [2] What this shows is that students with a high level of language is increasing ever so slightly but also that the higher grades (7,8,9) are accessed only by around 11% of the population. Thus, higher-level language is much less accessible to 89% of the population, defeating its entire purpose, but could this problem be entirely eradicated if we stop the use of high-level vocabulary, so everyone could easily interpret the ideas that authors/ speakers aim to convey? Not entirely. The fact is the audience is going to be carefully considered by the author and the language they use is not going to be done so impetuously. The problem, if there is one, only lies in when there is a disconnect between the audience and the level of language used. For example, my mother attempted to read the self-help book: ‘The Chimp Paradox’ by Dr Steve Peters, which aims to help with Confidence, success, and happiness, all 3 of which are indubitably universally sought after. She complained that the language that as a layman she could not decipher without the help of google. A book in the genre of self-help, which one would think is aimed towards everyone so anyone could benefit should not utilise a syntax that cannot be deciphered by the target audience as it is in fact detrimental to its mission statement of being a programme to help all. Pure irony. 

In contemporary society, as the aforementioned literacy rate is much higher than it once was, mediums such as the media flourish due to the larger potential audience and accessibility. Naturally, this attracts politicians and public speakers who wish to push their agenda on a potentially huge platform, in the majority of the cases, using their language. Mainstream media faces the unique challenge of having to appeal to the masses, having a target audience of the entire planet, and so the language they use is of paramount importance. Their primary goal is to sustain the attention of the masses and in order to do so, this must be reflected in the media’s vernacular. The language used must be simple enough that the layman can clearly understand the ideas conveyed and yet engaging enough so the viewer/listener doesn’t lose their attention. Although on the surface, this seems to be positive as no one is neglected as everyone with access to the media can clearly understand what is said in it, it has shown to be detrimental to the people’s well-being as it can be easily abused. The trade for the accuracy that is intrinsic to high-level sophisticated vocabulary in return for the accessibility of easier-to-understand language is a dangerous one. There is one man that personifies this danger more than anyone else: Donald J. Trump. No need for an introduction. Particularly the way that Trump uses the phrase, ‘peaceful transition’ proceeding his loss in the 2020 election exemplifies the danger of the trade that Trump has deliberately chosen to make. After losing office Trump made many comments that I am sure we have all seen on how the election was not fair and has 

‘cast unjustified aspersions on mail-in voting—claiming without evidence there has been and will be widespread fraud’ [3] After being accused of making the transition as difficult as possible for Biden he equivocates on the phrase, ‘peaceful transition of power’. Traditionally the phrase refers to the process of handing over the office and the subsequent power from one president to the next. The word peaceful refers to the open acknowledgement that it was a fair and just election and therefore a clear winner, in addition to cooperation between the former and to-be presidents (eg. By sharing intelligence briefings as well as vacating the White House when the time comes). But in the presidential debate pre-election in 2020 Chris Wallace poses the question “Are you prepared to reassure the American people that the next President will be the legitimate winner of this election?” to which Donald Trump replies, “So when I listened to Joe talking about a transition, there's been no transition from when I won. I won that election. And if you look at crooked Hillary Clinton, if you look at all of the different people, there was no transition. Because they came after me trying to do a coup. They came after me spying on my campaign. They started on the day I won and even before I won.” Trump attempts to redefine the phrase ‘peaceful transition’, stating it could have only happened if his opposition had not impeached him and (apparently) spied on him and his administration. Fundamentally saying his predecessors did not gift him a peaceful transition simply by criticizing him and objecting to his actions and/or policies. Here is where we see the danger of using less specific yet more accessible language. I would argue that the majority of English-speaking people would find the phrase ‘peaceful transition, to be a straightforward one to understand but the fact it is not very specific allows the abuse of its vague meaning. This defeats its entire purpose of being straightforward and easy to interpret, ironically rendering it the exact opposite of that: complicated. 

I find that among Trump’s opposition globally they believe pro-Trump supporters and Trump himself to be less intelligent and not well-spoken or well-read. Whether this is the truth is an entirely different argument, but this view itself speaks volumes as to the prejudices that are made on the grounds of how someone speaks. This is perfectly personified in a quote from the infamously controversial Washington Post: “ Former President Donald Trump’s Twitter feedback when he still had one — was rife with glaring misspelling[4]s as well as absurd lies. Some even suspected the misspellings were deliberate — intended to signal his contempt for eggheads who might care about such niceties.”. Although this quote is not directly speaking to Trump’s vocabulary, it still evinces the view that not only is Trump unintelligent because of the way he speaks, he is anti-intelligence somehow- having ‘contempt for eggheads’. [5]. It is unreasonable to assume that Trump is not intelligent and that how he speaks in any way provides evidence for that assertion, but it is a trap that is easy to fall into and one we must aim to avoid. This linguistic discrimination happens across the globe and across a multitude of languages, dividing us further rather than uniting us as language should. A French politician has brought forward a new law to make “glottophobia” - prejudice against regional accents - a criminal offence after a former presidential candidate mocked a reporter for her pronunciation. This phrase was coined by sociologist Philippe Blanchet of Rennes University to describe discrimination based on pronunciation and tone as well as vernacular. It is very easy to look down upon English which isn’t spoken with received pronunciation, but this prejudice is just that- a pre-judgement without any substantial evidence of anything. In the UK we are lucky to have our various dialects showcased by various high-profile celebrities on television but the same coverage is not present worldwide for other languages in other countries. [6] The reaction I think we ought to have to the events in France, 2018 is one of disgust to this outright discrimination purely from the accent and vernacular of the reporter, especially by someone running for President whose primary goal should be to unite all French people. The most radical yet hypothetically strong option would be to introduce one global language with one global dialect and accent. Is this realistic? Absolutely not and this is summarised by the angry response from Parisian MP Laetitia Avia, who tweeted:

“Do we speak French any the less with an accent? Must one suffer humiliation if one doesn’t speak standard French? Because our accents are our identity, I am tabling a bill to recognise glottophobia as a source of discrimination.” The specific phrase I would like to focus on is ‘because our accents are our identity. The way we speak and the words we use to convey our ideas are naturally such a seminal part of our identity and we should not be forced to speak in a way that doesn’t feel natural to us as that takes away our sense of self. 

Although language has always been a divisive factor in society, it runs off the pretence of uniting people under the ability to communicate. It is ironic how detrimental it is to its own singular purpose: being able to convey ideas. Although communication is arguably at the best place it has ever been in the history of humanity- it is still forevermore going to be a disconnecting factor and with the rise of cancel culture, it only seems that the disconnect will further widen. On one hand, language seems to only be becoming more and more segregating, on the other hand, there is a case for how information is becoming more and more accessible, with the rise of apps like TikTok, YouTube shorts and Instagram reels media outlets are forced to put the important attention-grabbing news into condensed clips that all of the millions of users on these applications would feel inclined to click on but nonetheless only convey half baked, most of the time useless, information seems to be going ‘viral’. The irony of a sophisticated lexicon has never been so prevalent. 

[1] https://www.gale.com/binaries/content/assets/gale-us-en/primary-sources/intl-gps/intl-gps-essays/full-ghn-contextual-essays/ghn_essay_bln_lloyd3_website.pdf

[2] https://thinkstudent.co.uk/what-is-the-average-gcse-grade-in-the-uk/

[3] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/logical-take/202010/equivocating-the-peaceful-transition-power

[4] https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/03/media/trump-twitter-typos/index.html

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/04/gop-proud-of-its-own-stupidity/)  

[6] https://www.theweek.co.uk/97272/what-is-glottophobia-and-should-it-be-illegal-in-france).