The Literary Addiction

The Literary Addiction Literature is plagued with a disease; a disease that runs rampant through its veins and descends into its most beautiful excerpts. Literature is addicted to obscurity, to transparency and to abstruse language masquerading as diction. Literature has grown into a beast that cares not for the wisdom or the profundity in words, but for their eloquence. Literature has been kidnapped and hidden whilst a monster takes its stead. Readers have adapted themselves to appreciate the length and voluminous traits of words and sentences, rather than their earnestness and lucidity. In essence, the god of literature has undergone a metamorphosis into obscure, pretentious, bombastic, and paltry language in order appease the erudite, rather than entertain the masses; yet words have reconstructed their foundation in such a way that diversion from their current status would collapse the entire framework of modern literature. The science of semantics has made the diagnosis of language. Humanity has dug a ravine that she will never be able to circumvent nor cross. Emotion and inconsistent reasoning constantly cloud our judgment and therefore make clear communication unachievable. Every word that one hears is automatically and subconsciously translated into a referent. This referent is the reference for understanding language; it is the symbol to which one relates words in order to comprehend them.1 Unfortunately, every

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The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase

person translates each individual word into a unique referent, thus creating vagueness and a fissure in communication. Still humans manage to function and speak somewhat efficiently due to comparison. To emphasize and attempt clarity, one must use synonyms and exaggeration. Take words such as ‘obese,’ ‘fat,’ and ‘chubby.’ With certain ease, a slightly educated person is able to arrange these from least to most extreme: chubby, fat, obese. Yet what if one were to ask where ‘portly’ would fit, or even ‘corpulent?’ And both appear to be euphemisms which one must use constantly in order to avoid offense and words that even could be labeled as more descriptive and eloquent. A journalist will never write, ‘there were 25,401 people in the stadium,’ rather he or she would address the crowd in a more appealing manner as to write, ‘The crowd exceeded 25,000 people!’ or ‘the stadium was sold out’ in order to construct a more interesting sentence. Yet in the effort to interest, the accuracy has been lost. An identical concept is used in saying, ‘the dog frolicked through the meadow whimsically’ vice, ‘the dog ran through the field.’ The connotation of the words frolicked and whimsical, and maybe even meadow, may change drastically from one interpreter to the next, and still the first sentence is more appealing to the reader. Sentences such as these are the epitome of irony; they are an attempt to become more descriptive with vague words, or vague diction. And still such “eloquence” is enamoring to readers.

Still the quest for liberation from eloquent diction is quixotic. Education is founded on the ideal that one must learn to write a certain way; one must appreciate and enjoy certain books; one must write and speak a certain way. Luckily, there are the rebellious, who diversify from this regime of tendency, yet unfortunately they are not the “prestigious” nor the “authors.” To be cultured is to follow expectation, and the cultured are those that run and maintain society. They are the beautiful, the erudite, and the prestigious; they are the lilies. Yet lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.2 And so this beast that we honor and respect, the beast of literacy, must still reign over us for the sake of order. Yet one should still recognize the fact that our culture is subservient to diction, i. e. to obscurity, transparency and pretentious language. For knowledge is power, and more importantly, liberty.

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Lilies that Fester by C.S. Lewis