Funny and tragic at the same time: a glaring example of the subversion of the King's English....and the DEATH of language where simple everyday objects loose their meaning.
Jacques Ellul
Finally, there is a trend toward a genuine enclosure in this environment.
And this strikes me as particularly important in language. Linguistic studies
(and not just structuralism) tend more and more to reduce human language
to a certain number of structures, functions, and mechanisms giving us the
impression that we now understand this strange and mysterious
phenomenon better than before. But what modern linguistics really does is
to reduce language in such a way as to make it fit neatly into this
technological universe, trimmed down to an indispensable communication for
the creation of the system. Language is losing its mystery, its magic, its
incomprehensibility. It no longer expresses dreams. Or rather, by being
technologically deciphered, language becomes a way of bringing dreams,
inspirations, aspirations, and ecstasies into the technological environment.
Today, it is out of place to make fun of the many hermetic jargons emerging
everywhere. This use of bizarre words ("perfect a praxeological approach,"
"optimalize decisions," "explore qualitative fields of
action," "parameterize future possibilities," etc.) is a desperate effort to
grasp the new "technological reality" by means of language. It is
intellectual hypocrisy to mock an attempt at fitting language to this
environment. But this striving is innocent. The true aggression is the
technization of language. For at this moment, everything is locked up in
the technological environment. When speech is a serf, everything is a
serf. Language is the ultimate outlet, the ultimate questioning, even if it
is reduced to a shriek. But the "it" and the "one" who are speaking tell us
that the technological lid has clamped down, and that this universe is
closed. Our modern linguists are heatedly working toward that end.
--excerpt from Ellul's: The Technological System
We will soon be lost for words _
