First, I'd like to thank Ms. in Tuba Town for the HTML makeover. I'm so glad the job wasn't entrusted to me, and it's awful snazzy. Woohoo!Second, I wrote yesterday about the pros and cons of choosing a single language for Europe, and I said that languages were "the original spontaneous social order". I take this truth to be self-evident, but the news this morning reminded me that many would beg to differ. It seems a new Duden has been published, and the German conjugating classes are all atwitter because they can now officially use words like "Twitter", "Bad Bank" and "Flatrateparty" without making a mockery of themselves. Other words, like "Jahrweiser" (archaic word for "calendar") and "Cochonnerie" have been cut from the starting lineup of German vocabulary. The interesting thing is that most Germans would most emphatically disagree that language is a self-organizing phenomenon, and I think it has to do with the German love of rules. When Germans talk about human rights or international law, it's as if they're talking about the laws of thermodynamics - naturally instituted, utterly clear and beyond dispute. It was a real pain in the @$$ back in my days as an English teacher, because Germans would often ask why Americans use "have" and the English use "have got", why there are multiple spellings for sceptical/skeptical or honour/honor, and who allows the regulator to be so careless. They could hardly conceive of the careless casuistry in the idea that the English language is simply what English speakers say and write.Germans prefer a different system. There is an "Institute for German Language", which was actually tasked with devising a unified German spelling system. The result is pretty much universally despised, but most Germans, even the loudest critics, tend to complain more about the IGL's final product than questioning their legitimacy even to try. Most Germans will similarly tell you, if asked about the source of their words, that the Duden might not invent them, but it is the supreme criterion of acceptability. Again, they talk about these institutions and processes as if they are necessary and perfectly natural, ordained elements of Creation. Many of them would have an absolute hissy fit if they stopped and considered the fact that they have ceded final say of their vocabulary to a privately owned publishing house. Not only is that haphazard and undemocratic, it could lead to profit! Horror!What the Germans, and most others too for that matter, might not realize is the extent to which all languages and vocabularies are sub-contracted to marketing types and ad-men. I had a discussion with Mrs. Klein this morning about whether or not the adjective "knackig" (crispy like a ripe apple) had any meaning when used as a modifier on interest rates. What the he11 is a crispy interest rate? She maintained that it is just a synonym for "good", but that implies that it can mean high or low with reference to interest rates, and I have a hard time with any adjective whose meaning is that flexible. Is any instrument that blunt worth having? The point, though, is that this was inspired by an ad, and some seem to accept immediately that crispy can apply to interest rates if it's been thusly printed somewhere. Let's not forget that "Twitter" is a brand name, and "tweeting" is a word invented by a company to describe interaction among its customers. The name of the new Microsoft search engine, Bing, was explicitly devised to encourage people to use it as a verb, just like "googling" (itself another verb née brand name).To take things full circle, does any of this help with yesterday's quandary of whether it would be more liberal to harmonize European languages or to maintain memetic diversity. Absolutely! I reckon there are two ways to solve the problem liberally. First, we can let nature take its course and see which languages prevail. In a process of creative destruction, new terms, dialects and languages emerge where others fade. This is kind of Burkian conservative liberalism, because it allows for novelty by preserving the traditional process, which creates without being pushed. Second, we could all vote on what counts as a word and whether or not any given word ought to be welcomed into our common lexical repertoire. Letting everyone vote on new words and usages might sound like a hugely bureaucratic idea requiring all kinds of new standards about who's competent to vote, what the criteria would be and who's going to pay for it all. That's true, but only as long as you, like the Germans, want the process to be centralized. If, however, you're willing to let the process occur at a more grassroots, distributed level, well then, isn't that what we do already?
