When elitism marries words

A few months ago I was flying from Chennai to Delhi with Air India, by virtue of it being one of the longest domestic flying routes; they had their swanky new Boeing 787s servicing the sector. Apart from the panoramic view that the large windows of the 787 affords a window seat traveler, are the perks of having a state of the art in-flight entertainment system, conspicuous by their absence in the old A320s, it is a major charm for flying in the Dreamliner. But I have to confess that despite the eclectic mix of media on offer, I have invariably, and that is at least 3 times, while flying on the Air India Dreamliner watched only one movie “Devil Wears Prada”. Once I had a friend traveling along, so I told him of Merrill Streep’s stupendous performance in the movie that compels me to watch it again and again. On being asked of my favorite scene from the drama, though it was a difficult choose, but with verbatim precision I described the scene where Miranda decides between two similar belts for an outfit and her gullible assistant Anne Hathway sniggers in between.

Miranda Priestly: Something funny?

Andy Sachs: No, no, nothing. Y'know, it's just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y'know, I'm still learning about all this stuff.

Miranda Priestly: This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blindly unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic "casual corner" where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of "stuff."

Hearing this, he called me a “sassy elitist”. Notwithstanding the new tag, I strongly discounted his claim of it being an elitist remark. It is rather a perfectionist’s quixotic desire that makes one notice the minutest of details. If only, you have ever trespassed into a purist’s imagination, then you would know that equating turquoise to cerulean is not only a cardinal sin but is also equivalent to pathological color blindness. It goes by the logic that whatever is incomprehensible to the masses is considered to be elite. To my knowledge, and unfortunately so, there is at least one more victim of this tragic logic and that is literature. It is evident from the fact that an author like, Chetan Bhagat, whose style is simple and approachable, is popular and much revered by the masses while someone like Sulman Rushdie known for the impeccable mastery of words and whose writing may require an occasionally  referring to the dictionary is considered elitist. The so called literary snobbishness of ‘elite’ writers was skillfully argued against by Eleanor Catton, author of The Luminaries, the 2013 Man Booker winning novel. In an article in Metro, she argues that we are overcome by our consumerist tendencies when we describe an article or a book that uses a non-traditional vocabulary, as elitist. In today’s world we as consumer are made to believe that everything is done to please us. Now, when we read a book that forces us to refer a dictionary all too often, our patience wears thin and we condemn the writing as elitist. It must be recognized that an author’s success lies in the number of people he/she is able to reach, and thus, no author in right mind would try to make his/her work inaccessible, especially so by resorting to deliberate wordiness. If we were to drop our consumerist demands from a book, that at most, requires us to be conveniently involved to understand the narrative, we would discover a world full of meaning. Let me expound upon this statement a little further.

Sometimes, a word may have a number of simple substitutes, words that we call synonyms. But the criticism that goes against authors is that, in order to flaunt their literary credentials they choose to use the most exotic of the synonyms. This may not be true. While it is true that synonyms have the same meaning but we must also recognize that they also have subtle differences when it comes to usage. Let us consider the words, mixture and concoction, the oxford dictionary lists them as synonyms. However, consider this for a minute; the word mixture may be used in a sentence like ‘a mixture of sands from different parts of India can be found at the confluence of Ganga and Yamuna’, now contrast this to ‘a concoction of sands of sands from different parts of India can be found at the confluence of Ganga and Yamuna’ does it sound right? No. The word concoction has an inherent connotation of something possible due human action. Though used as a noun here, it also demonstrates action that is represented by the verb concoct. Now let us take another group of sentences, ‘A concoction of rare Himalayan herbs was used to cure his ailment’ contrast this to, ‘A mixture of rare Himalayan herbs was used to cure his ailment’. The use of the word ‘mixture’ is very neutral when it comes to conveying the meaning of the sentence; to the contrary the word ‘concoction’ increases the charm of the sentence manifold. Thus, it is sometimes necessary for the author to use the exact word that befits the context. This must not be read as wordiness but be seen as an extra effort being put in the author to bring about the most exact interpretation of his thoughts in the reader’s mind.

Another compelling reason why we should welcome new words is because the impact they have on our understanding of the world. We understand that human mind makes observations and then expresses those observations through words. This relation between observation and words is not unidirectional, it is symbiotic. If we observe something then we would need words to express it and if we have the words to express a particular thing then we are bound to observe it. Let me give a personal example here, until a few days ago, I always thought that the study of language was called semantics, but to later I found out that semantics is only a branch of study of languages and that which pertains to meaning of words but there is another branch that studies the philosophical aspect of language and it is call philology. Thus knowing a single word opened up a wealth of knowledge. This made me look at the writings of philologists like Freidrich Neitzshe and also semanticists like Noam Chomsky.

And lastly, we must recognize that words found in a particular language are a representation of cultures where the language is spoken. Say the word bourgeois, if an equivalent is not found in a particular language then it may come to speak of that society as egalitarian, where everyone is equal. Similarly it is interesting to note that the act of possessing something which is represented by the word ‘have’ in English and ‘avoir‘ in French does not have an equivalent in Hindi. In Hindi, to possess something is referred to using the word ‘paas‘ which is a reference to distance. This may lead us to believe that the Hindi speaking cultures give little emphasis to materialism.

Thus words play a seminal role in developing our mental faculties, power to observe and communicate. Let us not denounce challenging writing as a masquerade for literary elitism, lest we become linguistically blind.