Eloquence Lost

The contemporary mellifluousness of Bill Clinton, for instance, engendered as much suspicion among Americans as it did praise. In contrast, George W. Bush’s admirers apparently find his limited verbal facility a sign of trust-worthiness. Ask most people for a list of great orators, and they inevitably draw from either the language-as-print era, or the infancy of language-as-pixels: Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It may be that we get the public orators we deserve.

Closer to home, Rex Murphy did chide Canadian politicians earlier this year for their dull, formulaic exchanges in a televised election debate. “It’s a strange rhetorical competition that is ashamed of rhetoric,” the broadcaster and columnist wrote, “a strange public-speaking contest that is embarrassed by eloquence.” But then Murphy, an uncommonly eloquent man with a penchant for periodic sentences and ten-buck words, is himself a bit of an anomaly.

John McWhorter suspects Americans have become too colloquial to ever be eloquent. The suspicion can surely be extended to their northern neighbours. Our cultures, as he puts it, “thrill most to English yoked to orally based charisma,” be it in the form of rap music, spoken-word poetry, or literary authors with writing styles that draw heavily from the vernacular, such as DBC Pierre, the winner of last year’s Booker Prize. A flare for the verbally transgressive is paralleled by a growing indifference to, and discomfort with, the “stringent artifice of written language.”

At the same time, we are also now in the thrall of new technologies whose impact rivals that of television’s in the Sixties and Seventies. Critics fear that cell phones and text messaging are further dumbing down conversations. Language, then, as pure digital? “Every change in our principal means of communication changes how we communicate,” notes the scholar Derrick de Kerckhove. Youth culture is certainly being influenced by digital language, a lingo notable for its spotty grammar and preference for codes and signs over an alphabet. Should hypertext ever migrate into the mouths of its adherents, it will produce some curious slang indeed.

Like it or not, that slang will probably be appropriate for our informal, impatient, post-literate age. The language will suit the way we live, and the way we talk – or don’t talk, perhaps – about our lives.

As many have noted, every generation tends to believe that language is in decline. McWhorter, at least, is careful to point out that we know little about how ordinary people spoke in the pre-microphone past. Listening to a recording of, say, a New York cab driver in the 1940s, as McWhorter did in his research for the book, suggests that too much nostalgia for a supposedly more refined era would be a mistake. “Youse fellas,” McWhorter quotes the cabbie as saying, “ya always got da same habit.”

It is true, though, that the cab driver a half-century ago still wanted his elected representatives to express themselves using elevated language and high rhetoric. For a variety of reasons, we no longer expect, or even wish, politicians to perform that function. Nor do many of us look any longer to pulpits for inspiration of any kind.

Maybe there is a link here between speech and subject. Could eloquence come more easily when topics involve honour and valour, faith and responsibility? You don’t hear those matters discussed much anymore, in either public or private life. But then, I am speaking as an example of a cross between a pure-print and a pure-pixels mind, conditioned as much by the old books I read as by the television I grew up watching.