Eloquence Lost

At age fifteen I discovered the language of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century adventurers. In my local mall was a Coles outlet, selling classic novels for a dollar each. The print was tiny and the binding the shade of cardboard. The novels seemed chosen by the publisher mostly for their brevity, and maybe with an eye to readers who liked their literature ripping. For a year or so I read only the likes of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Kipling’s Captains Courageous, and Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

They were wondrous and thrilling, these worlds, and never more so than when the characters opened their mouths. Everyone spoke with such refinement – and, often, at such length. Even the most rough-hewn sorts, their dialogue littered with “arrghs” and “ayes” and other piratical grunts, possessed a verbal quality I had not encountered in my own life.

That quality was eloquence, and I was, in fact, already too late to hear much of it out of the mouths of the living. Eloquence once referred to formal discourse. Of late, the term has come to be more generally defined as fluent and graceful talk, particularly of the kind that persuades. Grounded in spoken language that derived its cadence and grammar from the written word, eloquence was rooted in a widespread admiration for oratory. By the mid-1970s, when I was first taking an interest in such speech, those traditions were on the wane.

Now they have nearly disappeared, and the way we talk is much changed for it. Valley Girl-speak, popularized by the eponymous 1982 Frank Zappa song, is enshrined as North American lingo. Young people, with their penchant for slang and verbal dysfluencies – those pauses we, like, insert into our speech while seeking the, um, right word – are often tagged as the worst language offenders. But it is increasingly acceptable for adults to speak in the same manner. Forty-year-old men refer to each other as “dude,” and grown women can deliver a “whatever” with a snap that is the match of any character in the teen drama The O.C.

Whether or not the fate of eloquence is cause for lament may depend on what kind of language you favour. That, in turn, may reflect the way your mind has been conditioned, both to listen and to speak.

Nearly two decades ago, Neil Postman tracked the demise of what he called the “typographical mind.” In his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Postman used the famous 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas as an instance of a vanished culture. Audiences of ordinary citizens, including one crowd estimated at fifteen thousand, sat on benches for hours listening to Lincoln and Douglas debate slavery and abolition. They were able to do so, Postman said, because their intellects had been conditioned by the rigours of written language.

They had the training and the patience. “Language as pure print,” he called it.

But the age of typography has long been supplanted by the age of television. Starting in the 1950s, public business, be it politics, religion, or even education, had to be recast to work on TV, a medium that promotes, in Postman’s view, “incoherence and triviality.” Intellects shifted as well, along with conventions of speech. This is language as pure pixels, in effect.

Hence the sound bite and the sentence fragment, and the shyness about sounding too high and mighty before the camera. The linguist John McWhorter, taking up Postman’s argument, believes eloquence was doomed the 28 moment public figures abandoned “speech” in favour of “talk.” McWhorter writes in Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care that, at one time, “talking was for conversation. In public or on paper, one used a different kind of language, just as we use forks and knives instead of eating with our hands.” Now all of us, including politicians, seem content to eat with our hands, everywhere.

Our low regard for rhetoric may make traditional eloquence impossible. “Mere rhetoric” is the favoured putdown, implying that any verbal conceit or flourish cloaks a lack of substance or even sincerity. Politicians strike folksy notes as a result, preferring to err on the side of faux humble.