The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, July 31, 2023

Etymology: voir dire: It’s not trial week, otherwise known as the five circles of hell. That was last week. But it’ll roll around soon enough (the trial of Brennan Hill, on a murder charge, is ahead, and he snagged himself the only defense lawyer to win two high profile acquittals in Flagler), and when it does, we’ll have another jury selection, known by its affected and unnecessary old French name, voir dire. I never understand various professions’ cunnilinguing foreign tongues all over terms that could less pretentiously and more understandably for all of us be rendered in American English, whether it’s the legal profession’s oedipal complex for Latin (I’ve got your mens rea right here, bub), classical music’s continuo for Italian, or the sophomoric habit of Hollywood scripts of substituting French words to mask prurience or punning on the French to signal cowardice (as opposed to, say, punning on the extraordinarily high desertion rate of Confederates during the Civil War). It’s like the assumption that an English accent is somehow more erudite, that a French one is more cultured, that an Arab one is more suspect, dumber, dirtier, oilier (and so on: Arab stereotypes are like grains of sand in the Great Empty Quarter. They never end.) Here’s where I’m as fanatical as that bigot Noah Webster for the American language, which I happen to think the richest, most subtle and supple language on the planet for one reason: unlike our Trump-walled borders and too many of our minds, our language continues to live up to Emma Lazarus’s entreaty: Give me your tired, your Ebonics, your huddled pronouns yearning to breathe free, the wretched pedantry of your teeming rules. I lift my pen beside the golden door. The American language–that new colossus so very different from England’s version as dank as Westminster wigs–is our enduring freedom, our every-moment celebration of an actual, living Declaration of Independence, renewed with every new word or turn of phrase  immigrants bring to these shores. The American language is the last refuge of America as we yearn it to be. These days of seemingly endless despair over what we’re becoming, we still have this daily, hourly, endless renewal rolling off our tongues and filling our ears like a thousand Copland rodeos everywhere we are. Our American language is an unsung, always-sung blessing, always within reach (if nothing else, within us). “North America will be Peopled with a hundred million of men, all speaking the same language,” Webster had said. He is right about the American language. He is wrong about the same language: American is that unique language whose lack of anything unique makes it what it is, makes it the most democratic, most pluralist language on the planet. It is what we make of it, what we are free to make of it, pedantic grammarians and the Associated Press style book notwithstanding. I had intended this to be a quick take on voir dire. It’ll have to wait: language before jurors.

—P.T.

(With thanks to Brown Dog and Gulden Draak.)

Flagler Beach Webcam:

More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: “If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is.” (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.)

–From Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way. (1990)

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