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Vocabulary
more than pretension It’s happened every once in a while that portions of my published editorials wind up being different than the copy I hand in. In some rare cases the discrepancy has been so egregious as to alter or completely change the tone of what was being said. I’d always just acquiesced and accepted it as a reality of having whatever I wrote filtered through seven or eight people before going to print. Last week was far from the worst infraction, but the sentence I wrote was, “So the only thing more disappointing than the (St. Louis) Rams’ wholly unworthy performance was the complete paucity of wit found in the commercials.” However, when I checked the actual print I noticed that “paucity” had been replaced with “scarcity.” There is a jaw-dropping
amount of irony that in an editorial in which I mention a problem
in society being our increasing tendency to placate and pander to
the lowest common denominator, the editorial itself was guilty of
that very infraction. You may think that this means I have unwittingly attained the height of hypocrisy, but you’d be wrong. The real height of hypocrisy is either right-wing fanatics blowing up abortion clinics to protect “the sanctity of life” or singer Jessica Simpon’s use of sex to sell the message of abstinence, depending on how wrong you think killing doctors or nurses is (for me it’s pretty high up on the list, right next to unbridled laissez-faire capitalism and just above buying Creed albums) It can only be assumed that the word was changed because they didn’t believe enough people would know what “paucity” meant. Now, if you discard the subtleties of language, scarcity and paucity are basically synonyms. So why, you may be asking at this point, am I making this big a deal about something that really doesn’t much matter at all to anyone, anywhere? Because while this simple change really doesn’t matter, the larger issue that it represents does. Consciousness is only as large as the vocabulary that allows its expression. Words contain their own pitch and tone and subtleties and when we forget or gloss over those distinctions we lose an integral part of our ability for self expression. Imagine attempting to express a concept like “freedom” when the articulation of freedom no longer exists in the language. If concepts like autonomy, sovereignty and independence were erased from the vocabulary then how would you communicate an idea like liberty? I shudder to think of a point when dissatisfaction can no longer be expressed by the masses because the words simply don’t exist in their vocabulary. Limiting the lexis from which we can draw limits our consciousness — our literal ability to think. This may seem like a hollow justification of pedantic, pretentious writing, and to be fair, to a degree it is. But it seems ridiculous to spend all this time and money on a $75,000 education just to turn around and hide it. If anything, the purpose of discourse should be to raise the bar and that can’t be accomplished if forced to stumble under it. Tim
Dragga is a junior political science major from Lubbock. |
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