What The Meaning of "Is" Is

I love language. A neatly turned phrase causes me to pause and reread it, trying to gain appreciation of the nuances of the language that were captured and expressed so precisely in just that sequence. Anything different would lessen the impact of the perfect choices that were made by the author.

Here is such a passage which I encountered a few weeks ago when I took upon myself the task of really reading the works of Dickens. It is from the first page of Oliver Twist where he recounts the boy's birth in a workhouse:

The fact is, that there was considerable difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of respiration,- a troublesome practice, but one which custom has rendered necessary to our easy existence; and for some time he lay gasping on a little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and the next: the balance being decidedly in favour of the latter. Now, if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been killed in no time. There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old woman, who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer; and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract; Oliver and Nature fought out the point between them.

The turns of the passage easily demonstrate what Dickens brought to his literature.

But it is political discourse that bothers me this day. The flatulent vacancy that has characterized the entire vocabulary of the rise of the Messiah is the case in point. Hope, change, belief, and nothing else are offered, but the masses embraced it and dutifully chant the liturgy at every opportunity.

Malone Vandam over at New Paltz Journal captures it beautifully this morning:

For the Love of Language

Here's part of what he writes:

And the young, instead of developing verbal sharpness and fluidity, expanding their integrated conceptual base along with their vocabularies, appear to lose that sharpness and fluidity, having less of it when they leave college than when they entered high school. They wind up speaking an amputated pidgin language that is opaque to concepts beyond those that express the generalized popular therapeutic state of their emotions and moods. They listen to music that is racket with lyrics that are gibberish and are transformed