Intolerance and oversensitivity incongruent

Author: ANDREW CARNABUCI ’06

"Thus we will be incomprehensible," wrote Jacques Derrida, on the current direction of language in academia. Sadly enough, I believe that Middlebury College will soon prove Derrida's words prophetic. In our dogmatic kow-towing to idol of political correctness, we are also destroying the English language.

The other day, I learned that the Parton Health Center can perform for students something they refer to as a "Substance Use Assessment." This phrase means so little that it is useless. I like to eat my hamburgers and french fries with ketchup. Perhaps I might require a "Substance Use Assessment" to determine my Heinz intake. What they mean to say, clearly, is an "Alcohol Abuse Test," but is this sort doublespeak really the way we want to use our language? Does vagueness reduce our words to absurdities?

Next up, we have the now-famous "holiday tree." To what holiday does this tree correspond? Well, it's certainly not Chanukah, Ramadan or Kwanzaa, as none of them feature decorated trees prominently in their iconography. It is a Christmas tree. Why would one ever choose a vaguer descriptor over a more specific one? As a means not to not offend those members of the community not of the Christian faith? I am still waiting to meet the non-Christian among our community who was seriously and truly offended back when it was called the Christmas tree, but feels thoroughly at peace with the "holiday tree."

At a school that emphasizes its literature curriculum and hosts the most famous writers' conference in the world, one would think that our institutional literature might be up to snuff, but no such luck. A quick flip - or rather, Web-surf - through the College handbook will attest to this. Constantly it uses the most prominent - and most ugly - trope of the institutional newspeak, the dreaded "he or she." "If I student wishes to appeal the fine, he or she may...." Allow me to present: synecdoche. Shakespeare used it a lot. As any high school student could tell you, it is a literary device allowing a part to stand for the whole. Thusly, the masculine pronoun - or the feminine for that matter - may stand in for both genders. Synecdoche allows us to say "Mankind" to refer to what many - sadly - now call "Man- and Womankind." As English expert William F. Buckley points out, "If you can't see what's wrong with that, I can't explain it to you."

This is not the only linguistic abomination in our handbook however. Business-writing nonsense-isms abound, we are told to "utilize" things instead of "using" them. People do not "help," they "facilitate." This is a College which prides itself on producing good writers, yet its written materials sound like a legal brief.

Our conversational skills aren't great either. Just the other day, I heard someone refer to a "Non-Same-Sex Marriage." According to one friend of mine, we didn't "disagree," we were "differently-minded." This is absurd.

Some - probably those who will grow up to become those teachers who spend their free time blacking the swears out of Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn - will condemn me and my argument as insensitive and prejudiced, but that simply speaks to the lack of respect for the educational dialectic on this campus. Middlebury is a school where it is impossible to make a fundamentally conservative point without being heckled, ostracized and universally reviled by the belligerently hyper-sensitive community. The fundamental principle behind both democracy and academia is a free exchange amidst the marketplace of ideas and that exchange is made impossible by both anti-conservative dogmatism and the fundamental inability to communicate clearly in our primary language, both of which run rampant on this campus. It is time to reclaim our language. Jorge Luis Borges, a native Spanish speaker, wrote the vast majority of his works in English precisely because he felt it possessed a precision and depth of expression which Spanish lacked. We can, like Borges, revel in the richness of English or we can keep diluting and destroying it, spiraling ever inward to a vacuum of our own self-imposed ignorance. I, for one, will never surrender the English of Shakespeare, Milton and Keats for sacrifice upon the altar of academic tweediness, to the god of political correctness.