Paul Fussell
American writer and historian
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Bad language is so much the norm these days that there's virtually nothing said in public that if speaker and listener, writer and reader were honest and socially secure, couldn't be moved downwards towards a modest simplicity. The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.
—Paul Fussell, American writer and historian, BAD, or the Dumbing of America, 1991
Posted on November 7, 2003 at 6:50 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Your social class is still most clearly visible when you say things. "One's speech is an unceasingly repeated public announcement about background and social standing," says John Brooks, translating into modern American Ben Jonson's observation "Language most shows a man. Speak, that I may see thee." And what held true in his seventeenth century holds even truer in our twentieth, because now we have something virtually unknown to Jonson, a sizable middle class desperate not to offend through language and thus addicted to such conspicuous class giveaways as euphemism, genteelism, and mock profanity ("Golly!").
—Paul Fussell, American writer and historian, Class, 1983
Posted on July 12, 2000 at 8:50 PM
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