On Language and the Love of Language

I borrowed this quote from http://readinginterrupted.com/:

 

“Ne vous est-il jamais arrivé, lisant un livre, de vous arrêter sans cesse dans votre lecture, non par désintérêt, mais au contraire par afflux d’idées, d’excitations, d’associations? En un mot, ne vous est-il pas arrivé de lire en levant la tête?” – Roland Barthes

 

“Has it ever happened, that as you were reading a book, you kept stopping as you read, not because you weren’t interested, but because you were: because of a flow of ideas, stimuli, associations? Simply put, have you ever read while looking up from your book?” -Roland Barthes-

 

Firstly, I was captivated by the French since I have been lax in my French Studies now that school is out for the summer. It still always gives me a slight thrill when I read something in French and it clicks in my brain immediately, without having to sit and sift through the vocabulary buried somewhere in my cerebellum. Then, of course, the meaning caught me. If you have never had this experience I hope very much that you find it one day. There is nothing like reading a simple line of prose or poetry that gives your thoughts wings and send them flying across the landscape of your imagination.

 

I read a great deal more prose than I do poetry, but I’ve noticed through my studies in French—especially my literature classes—that there is just something more poetic about the French language. Maybe it’s the way you can still hear the age in the arrangements of the word. French today has evolved so much from the ancient French, but it is easier to imagine the Dauphin and members of his court conversing than it is to try and re-create the way America’s founders spoke.

 

French has still retained a great deal of formality that English lacks. We say “I saw Henry’s dog last night.” In French, one would say “J’ai vu le chien de Henri hier soir.” I saw the dog of Henry last night. The language just seems so much more complex, and in that frustrating, maddening complexity is where you find the real beauty. In movies where the speakers are French and the subtitles are in English, we lose so much of what is really said. In a movie I watched recently, for instance, a character compliments his wife’s cooking and says that he could smell the chicken all the way from the street. The subtitles? Something along the lines of “It smells good.” The bones are the same, but there is so much missing from the English. It is an interesting juxtaposition, hearing the two phrases side by side. The casual, non-French speaking viewer will never know how he

really felt about his wife’s cooking.

 

It is so intriguing to me how the same phrase in one language can be so different, it is even more interesting that the same language can be either completely dull and technical or can be vivid and engaging. No one reading the manual for a car alarm will find themselves in throes of imaginative bliss. I haven’t read many manuals in French, but other than sounding prettier, I can’t imagine they would create any more excitement than the ones in English.

 

Sometimes I wonder if normal people have favorite words like I do, or if they ever wish we still spelled things the British way: favourite, colour, and grey. I wish I could get away with spelling them that way. I wish I could use the word “egregious” at least once a day. There are even those words whose meanings are not interesting or pleasant: anaphylactic and schizophrenic and prurient. But there is just something about the way they roll off of the tongue. When did our daily language become so mundane, so devoid of life? I have to suppress the feeling of glee when I manage to slip a particularly intricate word into everyday conversation or into an academic paper. There is a time and place for blunt and technical language, without the frills and the frivolity. But, I hope it remains a very small place. For without language we would have no way to express our thoughts, and even the most scientific, non-literary, numerically minded person must, on occasion, think thoughts that beg for the most effervescent of words.