Missing Words

Listening to music earlier today, I began thinking about how vivid a picture of our society is painted by the music of the day. When I hear something a little out of the ordinary in the words to a song, it catches my attention. Usually, it makes me think that the complexity of our language is diminishing, an artifact of the erosion of the quality of teaching in our schools.

Now, that's probably wrong; it's not necessarily the quality of teaching that is eroding, it's the quality of people who are going into teaching...simply because our society underpays and undervalues teachers.

Back to my point. This morning, as I was listening to Myriad Harbor by the New Pornographers, I noted their use of the word "anthology" in that song. That's a word that was well-known and often-used when I was going to school; anthologies of poetry or anthologies of the works of a particular author or of a particular style of writing were commonly discussed in school. Today, I'm afraid a lot of high-school age kids would be hard-pressed to explain what an anthology is.

This rant is not about "anthology." It's about how language seems to be coursing downward because the richness of a highly specialized and highly descriptive vocabulary is undervalued. I see and hear pockets of rich language from time to time, but it's rare. It's especially rare to hear younger people use, or even acknowledge understanding, vocabularly that exemplifies a person who is well-read and knowledgeable.

When I was much younger, I remember Paul Simon's use of "a simple desultory philippic" for a song title. At the time, I did not know what those words meant, but hearing them made me run for the dictionary. I don't know if that's the common response today when a person is confronted with an unfamiliar word.

Of course, I may be utterly wrong-headed about my concerns about language. I've written before about Anu Garg's A Word a Day, which I gather is popular and growing in popularity, a sign that interest in expanding one's vocabularly may be on the rise. Incidentally, I recommend that site; and I recommend subscribing.

I'll get off my geezer pedestal now and return to regularly scheduled programming.