Do we believe in progress? If we do not think it is possible or of value, we are never going to change the world for the better.

Do we believe there is a truth? If not, plain language is beside the point. So is communication.

Your call.

Art for Art's Sake

Another source of cultural misunderstanding is the varying value placed on the aesthetics of language: the choice of a word, not because it is the shortest one to convey the desired datum, but because it is a beautiful word. I present as exhibit number one, my own wedding invitation, composed by my wife, who is Filipina. Two participants, it reports, will "Light our path to righteousness": they carried candles, as I recall. Four committed to "shower our aisle with flowers of prosperity"; these might also, I believe, have in some locales been called flower girls.

This is an open violation, surely, of the plain language principle taken literally. Yet such a supposition that beauty has no intrinsic value historically emerges from a specifically Protestant cultural ethic. It is of a piece with the Calvinist disapproval of dancing, card-playing, and colourful dress. Any Catholic country has a taste for language as decoration. Look at anything written or spoken in Ireland, for example.

Can six million Irishmen be wrong? Four Nobel Prizes for Literature argue no.

There is, however, such a thing as a plain style for ornamental writing: this is no contradiction. There is a difference, in art, between elegance, which is true beauty, and empty ornament. Anthony Burgess offers to my mind a ready model of elegance, in a Catholic writer. Do others remember his subtitles for the movie Cyrano de Bergerac, all in rhyme?

Or consider the first paragraph from A Clockwork Orange:

There was me, that is, Alex, and my three droogs, that is, Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what these mestos were like. ⁽⁴⁾

It may be just me. But that strikes me as a paragraph no Protestant writer would have composed. They wouldn't have bothered. There is a plain love of language for the beauty of it, as you find in Joyce. Consider the display of linguistic virtuosity: an entire novel in the first person in an invented dialect. Listen to the sound of "Korova milkbar" or "milk-plus mesto." Pure beauty. Yet at the same time, the paragraph is perfectly concise.