My friend Tony and I live a couple of hundred miles apart and, though we both also have houses in France, we maintain the same safe distance there.
This explains why we hardly ever see each other more often than once a year. Since we’ve been friends for some 35 years, that’s about as many encounters over half a lifetime. Nevertheless, thanks to the wonders of technology, we probably spend an average of at least three to four hours a week on the phone.
You do the maths but, in round numbers, that’s a lot of talking. Penelope apart, and yes, I know it’s hopelessly infra dig to talk to one’s own wife, I don’t think I spend as much time chatting with anyone else.
Since Tony is an atheist, our conversations stay close to the ground, mainly because any attempt to soar higher bores him to tears and he switches off. So we keep to current events, especially those that confirm our shared dim view of modernity, and also things like art, architecture – and language.
When this last subject comes up, we tend to swap our pet peeves about the wounds English suffers at the hands of modernity.
For both of us language isn’t just what we use but also what we do. It’s our instrument in the same sense in which the piano is Penelope’s instrument, and she would be aghast if someone took a sledgehammer to it.
The two words in the title above came up earlier today, with ‘to reference’ being my contribution and ‘to refute’ Tony’s. We disagreed on which one was worse, but agreed that both were appalling when misused.
Unlike the favourite word of our football commentators, ‘lacksadaisical’, the two words we find objectionable do exist. But God in whom Tony doesn’t believe created them to denote something dramatically different from the way our illiterate hacks use them.
‘To reference’ something means to cite an established source supporting one’s statement. This is routinely done in scholarly literature, with footnotes, endnotes and bibliography used for that purpose. When an editor tells me “You need to reference this”, I recognise the validity of the verb, even though I wince at its ungainliness and deplore the extra effort required.
I believe firmly that verbs are verbs, nouns are nouns, and never the twain should meet. Verbs made out of nouns are always jarring, although at times they are unavoidable, as in this case.
Alas, the way ‘to reference’ is widely used these days, even in writing, isn’t only jarring but also illiterate, pretentious and generally offensive. Lexically underdeveloped individuals use it in place of ‘to say’ or ‘to mention’, words they regard as inadequate to communicate the culture they haven’t got.
Thus one often hears abominations like “as I referenced yesterday”, with nary a cited source anywhere in sight. What the sledgehammer wielder means is “as I said yesterday”, but such a monosyllabic is five syllables short of what ignoramuses see as sophistication.
In his entertaining 1983 book Class, Paul Fussell referred to that sort of thing as a ‘prole syllable creep’, but that book was written before the wrong people scored the final victory in the class war. Today this craving for extra syllables at any cost is more likely to be caused by cultural rather than social pretensions. That doesn’t make it any less risible though.
Bad as that ugly solecism is, in the end I had to agree with Tony that the misuse of ‘to refute’ is even worse. ‘To reference’ testifies only to the speaker’s tin ear and ignorance he tries to mask, only succeeding in making it even plainer.
The use of ‘to refute’ to mean ‘to deny’, in addition to other deadly sins, also betokens the decommissioning of the most basic intellectual tools. Someone who says “as I referenced yesterday” doesn’t know how to use English. But someone who says “I refute what you are saying” also doesn’t know how to use his mind.
A refutation is a conclusive argument using evidence to disprove a statement. It means more than just denial or disagreement, neither of which requires any proof. Using it the illiterate way brands the speaker as someone who doesn’t know what constitutes an argument and what kind of argument can provide a refutation.
In the days when we still had educated classes, as opposed to isolated educated individuals, common folk made do with a vocabulary of under 2,000 words, most of them short and of Anglo-Saxon origin. They never misused longer words of Latin or Greek etymology because they didn’t know them.
Whenever they misused ‘posh’ words they had overheard by accident, educated people exchanged knowing smiles, reserving open derision for literature. Dickens, for one, was scathing about pretentious solecisms, which today would earn him the tag of elitist and, by ricochet, also possibly misogynist, transphobic and of course racist.
The OED helpfully informs us that the verb ‘to refute’ doesn’t enjoy a high frequency of use. It occurs only once per 200,000 words in modern written English. I suspect its correct use is much less widespread.
Language is indeed an instrument of oral and written communication. But it’s also a cultural and social indicator, a sort of compass showing the direction taken by society.
When England sat at the centre of a flourishing empire, her language was dynamic and creative. It was constantly expanding, but without losing its beauty and unmatched precision.
Even when lent out to various colonies, it didn’t suffer much attrition. Moreover, cross-Atlantic colonies enriched English with their own quaint, idiosyncratic usages (Tony dislikes them anyway).
England – and I’d suggest the Anglophone world in general – is undergoing a cultural and social collapse, and hence so is the English language. Rather than expanding, it’s actually contracting, in any area other than the profusion of specialised terminology.
English is getting smaller, uglier and much less precise, which to both Tony and me parallels and reflects similar tendencies in culture, along with the life of the mind and spirit. And if you wish to refute what I’m referencing, you’d better come up with sound arguments.
Last week I received an email notification from Marks & Spencer. It said: “Your parcel is on it’s way.” I’d have minded less if I hadn’t received an email notification from Marks & Spencer about eighteen months ago which said: “Your parcel is on it’s way.” That’s a year and a half without anybody in a notoriously non-proletarian business either noticing or (worse) caring.
The misuse of apostrophes isn’t as disastrous as the misuse of “refute”, which is approximately as disastrous as the misuse of “begging the question”, but it’s a sign of the times. The dark ages are returning, and this time the barbarians don’t need to burn the books, they merely have to make sure that nobody can read them – or that anybody who reads them is so hopelessly infected with cultural-Marxist prejudices that he can’t understand them.
As far as I can tell, the last half-competent poets writing in English were Larkin (died 1985) and Berryman (died 1972). And what is a language without poets?
I once knew a poet who shamed me for not having read Andrew Motion, then the Poet Laureate. So I read a verse or two and found much of the Laureate there, but none of the Poet. In R.S. Thomas (d. 2000), on the other hand, there is plenty of Poet and none of the Laureate. Have you read his work? He isn’t especially well-known but deserves to be. Like that other Welshman with the same name, R.S. goes well beyond half-competence.
I agree with every word you wrote, with one minor quibble. I’m not sure there are any non-proletarian businesses left — our age is exactly as dark as you say it is. The Bolsheviks failed to create the dictatorship of the proletariat and left the task for the bogeymen capitalists to complete.
Yes, I like what I’ve read of R S Thomas; he was at least the equal of his namesakes Edward and Dylan. I also like the later works of Roy Fuller (died 1991) and the earlier works of Geoffrey Hill (died 2016), and let’s not forget the very interesting Christian poetess Anne Ridler (died 2001). But they all seem to me to be minor poets, and it’s much easier to be a half-competent minor poet than to be a half-competent major poet.
The Dream Songs (1968) and High Windows (1974) seem to me to be the last foothills in a mountain range of major English poetry that once rose to heaven-approaching peaks.
Some years ago I laughed with my sister at the state of written communication in this country. I wondered if we would regress to the days of glyphs. Upon reflection, I think that may be preferred to the constant misuse of words. How many people know the difference between proved and proven? Darn few, I’d say. Years ago I remember most people using farther in place of further. Now the common mistake is in the opposite direction. Not knowing when to use lie or lay is another irritant. There are so many offenses to the ear. I agree that using all nouns as verbs and all verbs as nouns is jarring.
Back to the subject of glyphs and your observation that language is contracting. How many synonyms can one find for the word happy? In text messaging that is reduced to two: laughing face and laughing face with tears (discounting the smiley face, which seems to have found disfavor). For centuries the language was expanding, giving us more ways to express our ideas and feelings. Ah, well, progress.
My favorite way to highlight the fall is to read letters from Civil War soldiers, most of whom stopped attending school before their twelfth birthday.
In Britain, it’s police reports written by rank-and-file constables of yore. The write better than most of today’s academics.