Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

ugly words

Thanks to la Grande Rousse across the border in Canada, I've been reading up on how the francophone world views les mots moches 'ugly words.' There's a whole site, Dicomoche, dedicated to them or at least to their eradication, and whose motto is: "Ce que l'on conçoit mal s'ènonce obscurèment et les mots pour le dire arrivent pèniblement." ("Concepts one doesn't think through cannot be articulated clearly and the words only come with difficulty.") Speaking ugly can include the use of anglicisms, neologisms, solecisms, buzzwords (mots-bourdons). While I'm no friend of howlers or words blanched of meaning by thoughtless repetition, it seems to me that loanwords and metaphor are just a couple of ways that a language has of renewing itself or enriching its vocabulary. Of course, many francophones see French as their rightful, cultural patrimony, and unlike anglophones and their German cousins, they have formally organized their own guilds to protect the linguistic purity of la belle langue. To a certain degree, I agree with them, but it's awfully hard to legislate language.

[Addendum 06/26/03: Language Hat has made me, rightfully, reconsider my last sentence. It is hard to legislate language, though nations will try. Orthographies are probably the most successful tip of this iceberg, but speakers will often talk in new and interesting ways, and in matters of diachrony, I agree with Sapir that there's a drift, or a certain tendency, in language change. It was a slip — I plead heatstroke. I was trying to be nice, but it came out that I support bureaucratic language control in some way, which I don't. At most these academies only really control the upper registers of language, and the real change come from below.]