Short words
Winston Churchill (the Nobel Literature prize winner) wrote:
Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.
Oh, how I would like to write like that! But I let my grip go loose and the crisp short words slip out. Pursuing substance unfortunately precipitates neglecting appearance. Consequently, the unreadable result presents pompous, inflexible and awkward phraseology. Looking at what I write is like looking in the mirror in wonder, how the sorry monkey it shows can be I.
In Russian my plight is even worse. Much has been said about the wooden helplessness of this language in many situations, about its bureaucratization and arrested development in the last century, about a phrase or a book translated into Russian being longer, sometimes by half, than the original, about the near impossibility to translate songs keeping the number of syllables, so that they can be sung to the same music. Its modern public use is often pitiful and enraging at the same time, with its common compulsive need to avoid plain talk, to laboriously use any tired, confused or mixed metaphor instead of just selecting simple words for simple meanings. Пашем, как рабы на галерах, indeed.
I blame the Soviet school. It was taught that the common spoken language is the low art form, to be separated from the written one. “People do not speak like that” was an irrelevant critique. The complete awe I feel toward some Russian poets, with their seemingly effortless flowing written speech, is partly due to putting them against this background. But for the most part what I feel is plain envy. There are enough people around that can write well in Russian, the common ailments do not touch them. How do they do it? When I try to organize thought into writing, all life drains from it, leaving a disgusting wooden carcass.
I am no longer fully fluent in Lithuanian, but I was not sick with the acute longworditis when I was. Of course, there is some of this condition (and even a bit of the compulsive metaphoritis too) present in the media and the official parlance. But the Soviet influence was shorter, and Lithuanian is quite rich for a small language. Above all, it is not as sharply divided into different styles as Russian is.
Only in Hebrew I am free. A vocabulary that in another language would earn condescension from a professional mover, in Hebrew is adequate for all situations save literary discussions. As for the long inflexible words, there simply are none in Hebrew. Most Hebrew is formed from three-letter basic words (a wink with my Russian eye) and some of it is made out of four-letter words (a wink with my English eye). The imported long foreign words (like “temperature”) remain just that, foreign, commonly unloved and mispronounced. By the way, the fnnuy orbesavtoin taht snice we read the wdors wlhoe we can tloerate smoe lteetr mxiing is inpapcliable to Hbeerw. Of course, there is stuffy officialese in Hebrew, but it is easily avoided or used mockingly. The strongest quality of this language is that its simple words with brutally unequivocal meanings, once learned, catch the brain with both hands and hold for the dear life, pushing and shoving, crowding out all complexity, stamping on the toes of words from other languages. If only they would finally drop those stony wrong-headed quadratic letters for a proper Latin alphabet. But that is another story.
Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.
Oh, how I would like to write like that! But I let my grip go loose and the crisp short words slip out. Pursuing substance unfortunately precipitates neglecting appearance. Consequently, the unreadable result presents pompous, inflexible and awkward phraseology. Looking at what I write is like looking in the mirror in wonder, how the sorry monkey it shows can be I.
In Russian my plight is even worse. Much has been said about the wooden helplessness of this language in many situations, about its bureaucratization and arrested development in the last century, about a phrase or a book translated into Russian being longer, sometimes by half, than the original, about the near impossibility to translate songs keeping the number of syllables, so that they can be sung to the same music. Its modern public use is often pitiful and enraging at the same time, with its common compulsive need to avoid plain talk, to laboriously use any tired, confused or mixed metaphor instead of just selecting simple words for simple meanings. Пашем, как рабы на галерах, indeed.
I blame the Soviet school. It was taught that the common spoken language is the low art form, to be separated from the written one. “People do not speak like that” was an irrelevant critique. The complete awe I feel toward some Russian poets, with their seemingly effortless flowing written speech, is partly due to putting them against this background. But for the most part what I feel is plain envy. There are enough people around that can write well in Russian, the common ailments do not touch them. How do they do it? When I try to organize thought into writing, all life drains from it, leaving a disgusting wooden carcass.
I am no longer fully fluent in Lithuanian, but I was not sick with the acute longworditis when I was. Of course, there is some of this condition (and even a bit of the compulsive metaphoritis too) present in the media and the official parlance. But the Soviet influence was shorter, and Lithuanian is quite rich for a small language. Above all, it is not as sharply divided into different styles as Russian is.
Only in Hebrew I am free. A vocabulary that in another language would earn condescension from a professional mover, in Hebrew is adequate for all situations save literary discussions. As for the long inflexible words, there simply are none in Hebrew. Most Hebrew is formed from three-letter basic words (a wink with my Russian eye) and some of it is made out of four-letter words (a wink with my English eye). The imported long foreign words (like “temperature”) remain just that, foreign, commonly unloved and mispronounced. By the way, the fnnuy orbesavtoin taht snice we read the wdors wlhoe we can tloerate smoe lteetr mxiing is inpapcliable to Hbeerw. Of course, there is stuffy officialese in Hebrew, but it is easily avoided or used mockingly. The strongest quality of this language is that its simple words with brutally unequivocal meanings, once learned, catch the brain with both hands and hold for the dear life, pushing and shoving, crowding out all complexity, stamping on the toes of words from other languages. If only they would finally drop those stony wrong-headed quadratic letters for a proper Latin alphabet. But that is another story.