John Ralston Saul
Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Administrative dialects seem to have been inspired by the baroque politeness of the Victorian middle-class tea-party. Reality is described through allusion and indirection. Technocrats speak as if they can only dignify their lives through verbal propriety.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on November 24, 2005 at 6:24 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Rationalization: A transitive verb meaning to close, to shut down, to make redundant, to go bankrupt, to fire. ... Rationalization is to economics what bleeding was to eighteenth-century medicine.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on February 16, 2004 at 6:44 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
As economic and social conditions have gradually sunk, happiness, with its twisted meaning at the ethical and legal centre of our society, has seemed increasingly lugubrious and out of place. In a more practical world, there would be a formal process for retiring a word from active use until it finds itself again.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on January 14, 2004 at 12:50 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Deconstructionism can also be seen as a school of light comedy. After all, to argue that language has no meaning is to eliminate your own argument. The deconstructionists may after all simply be suffering from an acute lack of irony.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on December 1, 2003 at 3:55 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The moment a word or phrase begins to rise in public value, a variety of interest groups seek either to destroy its reputation or more often, to co-opt it. In this latter case, they don't necessarily adopt the meaning of the word or phrase. They simply want control of it in order to apply a different meaning that suits their own purposes.
Words thus are not free. They have a value. More than any commercial product they are subject to the violent competition of the emotional, intellectual and political market-place.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on October 24, 2003 at 4:11 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
It may be that the single option left for serious writers is to avoid irony and the big questions altogether and concentrate instead on re-evaluating in a sober and modest manner the simple words we use every day.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on February 9, 2000 at 7:53 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Every tense and mood of a language has its enemies. Those of the subjunctive are public relations, propaganda, opinion polls and the religion of expertise. A civilization which rewards so generously the ability to sell illusion as if it were reality is unlikely to reward grammar which examines the uncertain ground between the two.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on March 3, 2000 at 6:30 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Comedy: The least controllable use of language and therefore the most threatening to people in power.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on April 20, 2000 at 3:04 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Writers aren't supposed to be life models or religious prophets, clean of mind, clean of body. Nor are they supposed to be loved. Their only job is to make language work for the reader. That is the basis of free speech. Whatever the vested interests of the day may be, they invariably favour an obscure language of insider's dialects and received wisdom. So the writer turns nasty. It's a public service.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on April 13, 2000 at 9:17 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The single and shortest definition of civilization may be the word language.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on May 2, 2000 at 7:53 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
An obsession with polite or correct public language is a sign that communication is in decline. It means that the process and exercise of power have replaced debate as a public value. The citizen's job is to be rude — to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt. Politics, philosophy, writing, the arts — none of these, and certainly not science and economocs, can serve the common weal if they are swathed in politeness. In everything which affects public affairs, breeding is for fools.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on April 12, 2000 at 8:49 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
In surveys of lie-perception levels, 75 per cent of those questioned will pick out an average lie when they hear it; 65 per cent when they read it; and 50 per cent when they see it. The reason that revolutionary change is often tied to oral language is that this remains the most accurate means of real communication. We have great difficulty disbelieving what we see. This is one of the great risks in a society increasingly dependent on electronically manipulable images.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on September 21, 2000 at 2:27 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
We have insisted that we need leadership and so have reverted to the divine monarchy in which, whatever else he may be, the leader is presented in public as a symbol. Like his clothes, his words are chosen for him. Language is treated as performance, not communication. That he has not read the books his speeches quote or initiated the thoughts his speeches think is neither here nor there. Either we wish discussion and doubt or rhetoric and reassurance.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on June 21, 2000 at 7:18 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Dictionary: Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order.
—John Ralston Saul, Canadian essayist, novelist, and critic, The Doubter's Companion, 1994
Posted on August 19, 1998 at 8:43 AM
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