The Growlery,
Essays by
Michael Gilleland
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The Growlery,
Essays by
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Newspapers
On the Abolition of Certain Words
Archives
Many of my intellectual heroes have a decidedly jaundiced view of newspapers and the journalistic profession. Søren Kierkegaard, The Last Years: Journals 1853-1855, tr. R.G. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 98, says:
If I were a father and had a daughter who was seduced, I should by no means give her up; but if I had a son who became a journalist, I should regard him as lost.And elsewhere in his journals, he condemns newspapers for creating a distressing uniformity of opinion among their readers:
In a certain sense I could wish for men to be punished through the newspapers reaching their goal and making everyone into copies -- a fearful punishment: a million men entirely like one another. It could be presented in a moral tale and called 'Envy punished'. And the punishment, of course, would be the most agonizing boredom. (op. cit., p. 229)
In his journals, letters, and essays, Henry David Thoreau raged against newspapers. Here are some passages from his journals:
I believe that in this country the press exerts a greater and more pernicious influence than the church. We are not a religious people, but we are a nation of politicians. We do not much care for, we do not read, the Bible; but we do care for and we do read the newspaper. (April 1851)
The newspapers tell us of news not to be named even with that in its own kind which an observing man can pick up in a solitary walk, as if it gained some importance and dignity by its publicness. Do we need it to be advertised each day that such is still the routine of life? (June 13, 1851)
The last two Tribunes I have not looked at. I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire, -- thinner than the paper on which it is printed, -- then those things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them. (April 3, 1853)
And here are some similar sentiments from Thoreau's letters:
If words are invented to conceal thought, I think that newspapers are a great improvement on a bad invention. (November 20, 1849, to H.G.O. Blake)
Do not read the newspapers. (August 9, 1850, to H.G.O. Blake)
Blessed are they who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature, and, through her, God. (April 1861, to Parker Pillsbury)
And finally this passage from Thoreau's essay A Plea for Captain John Brown:
As for the herd of newspapers and magazines, I do not chance to know an editor in the country who will deliberately print anything which he knows will ultimately and permanently reduce the number of his subscribers. They do not believe that it would be expedient. How then can they print truth?
In a wonderful screed against The Daily Papers, another nature writer, John Burroughs, rants:
Who can help a pitying or a scornful smile when he hears of a school of journalism, a school for promoting crime and debauching the manners and the conscience of the people? -- for teaching the gentle art of lying, for manufacturing news when there is no news? The pupils are taught, I suppose, how to serve up the sweepings from the streets and the gutters and the bar-rooms in the most engaging manner. They are taught how to give the great Public what it wants, and the one thing the great Public wants, and can never get enough of is any form of sensationalism.Buroughs was probably thinking of the first journalism school in the United States, started at the University of Missouri by Walter Williams in 1908.
Leopardi, in The Dialogue of Tristram and a Friend, from his Moral Essays, puts these words into the mouth of Tristram (tr. Patrick Creagh):
I believe in and embrace the profound philosophy of the newspapers, which by murdering literature and all other studies, especially if hard and disagreeable, are the teachers and beacons of the present age.Leopardi is being ironical, of course.
The French novelist Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to Louise Colet (August 26, 1846, tr. F. Steegmuller), asked:
What would I learn from those wonderful newspapers you so want me to take each morning, with my bread and butter and cup of coffee? Why should I care what they have to say? I have very little curiosity about the news, politics bores me to death, and the literary articles stink. To me it's all stupid-making and irritating...Yes, newspapers disgust me profoundly -- I mean the ephemeral, things of the moment, what is important today and won't be tomorrow.
And in a letter to George Sand (September 8, 1871), he returns to the same theme:
The press is a school that serves to turn men into brutes, because it relieves them from thinking.
William Vallicella, in his Aphorisms and Observations: From the Journals of a Philosopher, shares Flaubert's lack of enthusiasm for starting the day off by reading a newspaper:
Early morning pollution. Thwap! A load of crap in the form of newspaper pap is slapped upon my neighbor's driveway. Now he has his necessary morning mind pollutant to go with his coffee and cigarette.
George Sayer, Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 206, quotes Lewis as saying:
You don't need to read the news. If anything important happens, far too many people are sure to tell you about it.
Lewis' contemporary Dorothy Sayers, in her book Unpopular Opinions (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947), has a fine essay entitled "How Free Is the Press?" on pp. 156-164. She levels the following criticisms against newspapers:
On the other hand, the dramatist Henrik Ibsen read little but newspapers. Michael Meyer, Ibsen: A Biography (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971), p. 475, says:
Ibsen's dislike of reading books has disturbed many a man of letters, starting with Edmund Gosse; but it is not surprising that he, whose principal interest was modern people and modern ideas, should have found the newspapers more rewarding.
Although I don't read newspapers much, I confess that I do avidly read the journalistic writings of authors who practiced the trade, such as Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and Malcolm Muggeridge. Even they sometimes viewed their own craft with distaste. In Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 122, Muggeridge (who was a television star as well as a newspaperman), wrote:
As the means of collecting and transmitting news accelerates, so that words, and later images, flash across the world like lightning, the authenticity of news becomes ever more dubious in the eyes of those who handle it, and ever more convincing in the eyes of those to whom it is served up.
Despite all these criticisms, most of them valid, against newspapers, as a means of finding out what's happening in the world they are preferable to the way in which many young adults are now apparently getting their knowledge of current events, from the likes of David Letterman, Jay Leno, and other late-night comedians.
Advocates of political correctness are engaged in a systematic campaign to ban certain supposedly offensive words from public discourse. But in some cases opposition to these words is based on inaccurate folk etymologies, and many of the banned words are in fact innocuous.
According to a BBC article, in March of 2002 British Home Minister John Denham was attacked for using the word 'nitty-gritty' to delegates at a Police Federation conference in Bournemouth. The reason? 'Nitty-gritty' is supposedly a slave traders' term for the debris found at the bottom of a ship after a voyage. But there is no evidence for the existence of this word before the twentieth century. It's a reduplicated form, created in the same way as 'namby-pamby' and other such words.
The case of David Howard, who resigned his job in a kerfuffle over the use of the word 'niggardly' is well-known. He was eventually reinstated. Here is the official statement by Mayor Anthony A. Williams of Washington, DC, regarding David Howard (February 3, 1999):
I met with David Howard on Wednesday, February 3rd and asked him to withdraw his resignation as Director of the Office of the Public Advocate and return to work. Mr. Howard indicated he would prefer to serve in another capacity within the Williams Administration. Mr. Howard is working with my Chief of Staff and the Office of Personnel to determine to which position and when he will return to work for the District of Columbia.
The recently completed review of the incident confirmed for me that Mr. Howard did use the word 'niggardly' but did not use a racial epithet. The review also showed that an employee of the Office of the Public Advocate did misunderstand Mr. Howard to have used a racial epithet.
The same misunderstanding plagued an English major at the University of Wisconsin, Amelia Rideau. She was so upset at the use of the word 'niggardly' by Professor Standish Henning that she "began to cry and stormed from the room," later demanding that the University ban the word from its classrooms.
The March 15, 1999, issue of Take Our Word For It debunks once and for all the absurd notion that the word 'picnic' comes from the custom of bringing a meal to eat at a lynching. This foolishness was disseminated in an email signed Delores E. Hollins:
Although not taught in American learning institutions and literature, it is noted in most black history professional circles and literature that the origin of the term picnic derives from the acts of lynching African-Americans.... We should choose to use the word 'barbecue' or 'outing' instead of the word 'picnic'. Please forward this e-mail to all of your family and friends and let us educate our people.Let us mislead and dupe our people, rather.
In my own state of Minnesota, the legislature enacted and the governor signed the following law a few years ago:
CHAPTER 53-S.F. No. 574:
An act relating to Indians; requiring the commissioner of natural resources to change certain names of geographic features of the state.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF MINNESOTA:
Section 1. [COMMISSIONER OF NATURAL RESOURCES TO CHANGE CERTAIN NAMES.]
On or before July 31, 1996, the commissioner of natural resources shall change each name of a geographic feature in the state that contains the word "squaw" to another name that does not contain this word. The commissioner shall select the new names in cooperation with the county boards of the counties in which the feature is located and with their approval.
Section 2. [EFFECTIVE DATE.]
Section 1 is effective the day following final enactment.
Presented to the governor April 17, 1995.
Signed by the governor April 18, 1995, 12:14 p.m.
Officials of Minnesota's Lake County, on the Canadian border, had a sensible response. They offered to rename Squaw Creek and Squaw Lake as Politically Correct Creek and Politically Correct Lake.
This waste of the people's time and money arose from the mistaken notion that 'squaw' is derived from a Mohawk word for the female genitalia. William Bright, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics & Anthropology, UCLA, and Professor Adjoint of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder, demolishes this idea in his article (in Microsoft Word format) The Sociolinguistics of the 'S- Word': 'Squaw' in American Placenames.
Not content with destroying long-standing place names, some even want to rename the oldsquaw duck the long-tailed duck, according to Nora Zamichow in an article published in the Los Angeles Times, November 12, 1999, with the headline "Name Flap Ruffles Feathers; As Multicultural Sensitivity Grows, Common Monikers for Birds and Plants Are Being Discarded as Offensive. But Some Observers Fear Loss of Vibrancy and Historical References in Our Language." The guilty party in this case is April Go Forth, member of the Ani-YunwiYah tribe and director of Resources for Indian Student Education, a state-funded program in California's Modoc County.