To Thou or not to Thou

The second person informal pronoun has dropped out of use in English. Evidently this began mid-way through the seventeenth century. Some people put the date of disuse earlier—evidently because it was a way of signaling that the speaker using the informal pronoun intended to make the person so addressed feel inferior. This didn’t happen elsewhere. Hence when we read eighteenth century German poetry or fiction, the use of this pronoun sounds perfectly natural. Not so in English.

I bring this up as a genuine problem in translation—or in reading old English texts. I’ve often thought that translating the second person informal as encountered in most European languages to this day by using thou, thee, thine, and so on is a kind of artificiality. It isn’t done in translating modern fiction. Why then persist in doing so when translating old poetry? Reading Schiller doesn’t give people the sense of reading somebody old and dusty. It all sounds perfectly modern. Hence I resolutely translate that pronoun into its plural form in English. That way I give it the same timeless feel that the original in another language still retains. As for reading, the Bible comes to mind. To erase the artificially imposed but ultimately secondary meaning on everything that “this is really old,” the new translations do what I do:

What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?
What does a man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?

It profiteth thee, scrivener, to use you for thou, and yours for thine.

Straws

In ordinary life people make distinctions between the practical and the philosophical. I hear people say: “Well, let’s not get too philosophical about that.” This stance puts philosophy into an airy-fairy region of reality and suggests that it has no practical bearing, thus that it isn’t real. I note here that one does not encounter this attitude uniformly across the globe. It is the product of a culture. For a while, about fifteen years ago, I had frequent dealings with a number of Russian immigrants. These were ordinary people, not intellectuals. They tended to come alive precisely when “things got philosophical”; they valued that mode of thought; it stimulated them; they could and did participate.

Philosophy is one straw in the wind. The notion of honor is another. In our culture honor is largely associated with backwardness and tribalism. Its high forms—and the high development of self that these represent—have become incomprehensible. Honor survives in diluted form only as sportsmanship, but the ingestion of steroids by some of our leading athletes indicates that honor is fading even in sports.

Manners? What manners? you might ask. Courtesy to women as I was taught it as a boy has become the negative of sexist behavior. Elderly women accept such minor gallantry as opening doors for them—if, sometimes, with a look of surprise or anxious suspicion. Men were supposed to honor women once (that word again) and, by courtesy, to communicate that attitude. The elderly were also supposed to have been honored, but today, curiously defying reality, we are supposed to pretend that aging doesn’t happen. The young therefore don’t invariably and spontaneously yield a seat to the aged. It still happens. Virtue flowers naturally in the human soul. But the new training seems to reach most.

Worst of all—and here is the confessional part—the culture is such that I find myself behaving in the modern mode time and time again. And it’s always only afterwards, on the way out to the car or on the way home, that I realize with a start what a slob I have become. When the whole culture acts in a certain way, it helps the individual. I still keenly remember how careful I became, years ago, during a trip to Japan—realizing there that a much higher standard prevailed. And I hastened to conform.

What all this signifies is that comprehensive understanding of reality, coherence between vast structures, and complexity are being lost. Philosophy is practical. Honor is superior to mere mutual advantage. Women really are different from men—and vive la différence. Recognizing that difference—and where it applies and where it does not—testifies to a power of differentiation. The elderly deserve special courtesies because they are weaker, because knowledge and experience are valuable and should be honored (and in courtesy acknowledged even if not present in every instance). Honor and courtesy arise from a well-developed understanding of values—and a recognition that values by their very nature are hierarchically arranged.

Another straw in the wind and I will go indoors. Our highest leaders leave office and then convert their fame into vast sums of money. Whatever happened to towering figures like Robert E. Lee who never used the word “enemy” but contented himself with saying “those people,” and who, after he retired, with barely any assets at all, resolutely avoided any hint of cashing in? It also troubles me to think—having learned that lots of people have never heard of the Battle of Gettysburg—that there are masses of people out there who may not recognize Lee's name, never mind his splendid example.

"Liberal" and Other Changing Words

Some words carry such a heavy cargo of meanings that controversies can boil up around them almost spontaneously. “Liberal” is one such word, here taken in its adjectival sense. It carries positive and negative connotations. Liberal describes a kind of education. It can mean generosity or amplitude (“a liberal helping”), also lose or free (“liberal translation”). One of its meanings is broadminded, thus “not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms.” An obsolete meaning of it (obsolete according to Merriam-Webster, but I’m not so sure myself), is licentious, thus lacking moral restraint. The word’s root is from the Latin (liber, free), thus free concerning often restrictive customs and free with means often tightly held. In politics it once meant favoring free trade—what today is usually labeled conservative, but the older meaning still survives in Europe.

Curiously a liberal education, strictly speaking, is the medieval curriculum called the trivium and the quadrivium. Brigitte once gave me a wonderful book on this for Christmas, The Trivium, by Sister Miriam Joseph (Paul Dry Books, 2002), something of a classic on the subject. Let’s look at how “liberal” that curriculum sounds: the trivium itself is logic, grammar, and rhetoric; the quadrivium, according to Sister Miriam’s description is “the four arts of quantity pertaining to matter,” thus arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Liberal once, obsolete now. “Music?!” a modern would say. Words gain meanings and loose them. Courtesy once had a vastly greater meaning than it has at present; I have in mind Castiglione’s The Courtier; rhetoric once had status enough to label a whole curriculum; now people have trouble spelling the word.

“Stereotyping” is another word that has undergone extensive redefinition over time; it once meant a metal plate made from a pattern—to be used for printing. It used to mean making many true copies of a single mold; it has come to mean imposing a single meaning on highly variable and changing situations. Functionally, I think, it is a word meaning prejudice, but precisely because prejudice has become extremely pejorative in the wake of the civil rights movement, another word needed stamping out as it were. Prejudice itself is a word that has undergone great transformations. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) knew it, and used it, to mean pre-judgment, consensus, custom, tradition—thus in a positive sense*. Each of those words, in turn, resemble stock on Wall Street if we take a long enough view. Up they go and down, and around and round they go…

All this in shy reaction to a small controversy on another site which intrigued me enough to engage in this totally liberal, meaning free, examination of words—which never fail to fascinate me, especially not when some minor explosion causes their energetic ricochet to draw my attention from a safe distance.
----------
*Extensively discussed in Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind on p. 38 and elsewhere.