We write worse and worse, and writing is not a skill that we tend to highlight on our CVs or on our job portals. skills on LinkedIn. We write very little, and when we do, we have no mercy for full stops, commas, accents and much less for the argumentation and structure of the text. In the networks we neglect language in favour of efficiency, and I am convinced that this seemingly innocuous laziness contaminates the way we write, also at work. Postings on LinkedIn, the network where we are supposed to showcase our best professional virtues, are full of mistakes - some of them serious. This situation, which some might describe as exaggerated or tetchy, has led us to a more disturbing reality: the lack of thought and the widespread scepticism of rational discourse.
Dispersion is the quintessential quality of our time. Bauman coined the well-known term "liquid modernity" to explain the inconsistency that flows in our lives: work changes with the months -we are passionate about new professional adventures-, lifelong love has become a naivety and every year we travel to a different place in search of unique and unrepeatable experiences.
Language, the object that concerns us, has also been affected by this phenomenon and is already showing its symptoms. Its economisation, without any aesthetic vision, is palpable in the air. Abbreviations are a common element in our emails - sometimes I wonder if Shakespeare would have allowed "FYI" or "ASAP" -; we neglect punctuation marks; we repeat words without making an effort to find alternatives; precision in writing means haughtiness, and Anglicisms run rampant and seek to justify our mastery of not one, but two languages. The reader may think that these trivialities are the pedantry of a fussy and inexperienced journalist, but investors do not hesitate with numbers - they do not spare a tenth -, lawyers with laws and legal terms, and civil servants with their working hours. But..., are we so much at stake with language? Yes, and I will try to explain why.
Language is no longer an inheritance but an information carrier.
Dispersion, which rejects rootedness and constantly seeks to reinvent itself, undervalues tradition and, with it, language. Tradition comes from the Latin traditio o traditioniswhich refers to that which is passed down through the generations. In this sense, language is above all past and memory; without language there is no history. It is not surprising that in the age of the economisation of language, the Minister of Universities states without hesitation that memory has less and less meaning in education because everything is on the Internet. Man no longer understands himself through others - those who preceded him - but through data management; language has ceased to be an inheritance and has become a medium for information. Hence, reading the classics seems pointless and gobbling up headlines a means to be well-informed.
Language helps us to understand and humanise our world. For example, psychological problems arise in part because we do not know how to identify what is happening to us and explain in words what is going on inside us. Language mentions things for what they are. When I became interested in botany, the group of trees that made up a homogeneous forest became a more diverse and complex reality. Each tree has its name and a concrete reality: holm oak, cork oak, juniper, pine, eucalyptus, elm... Language enriches the world around us and gives it a deeper meaning. Wittgenstein's famous phrase - "The limits of my world are the limits of my language" - reminds us that without words, reality becomes indifferent and poor. And it is not surprising that the deterioration of language is accompanied by an increase in ideologies, simplifying discourses and verbiage; an anonymous reality, without names, is fertile ground for single-minded thinking.
Miguel Delibes was very aware of the need to take care of the word. Throughout his life, he denounced the abandonment of rural Spain and the death of the language that was kept alive through its people and customs. If the people disappeared, there would no longer be anyone to name and give meaning to El poplo del Elicio, El pozal de la Culebra or Los almendros del Ponciano. The Castilian writer knew that nature contemplated - and named - is always more valuable than the unknown. Giving meaning to our lives consists of making room for language.
Knowing has become a return to the pure and simple act of seeing.
In the culture of dispersion, the word has been dethroned by the image. Giovani Sartori wrote an interesting essay on how the image has altered our way of knowing and interpreting facts. The homo vidensunlike the homo sapiensHe sees but does not think. Paradoxically, his visual culture is poor, since to appreciate the art of the image, one needs a culture of the word, and he creates that fictitious dichotomy that goes like this: a picture is worth a thousand words. For Sartori, knowing has become a return to the pure and simple act of seeing, which annuls concepts and atrophies our capacity for abstraction. No matter how much we are affected by an image, showing a prisoner leaving prison does not explain freedom, just as a snapshot of a poor child does not define poverty, or a picture of a sick person does not define illness. In this sense, writing not only helps us to describe, but to explain in order to understand. If we want to improve our critical thinking - this is a skill we like to share on LinkedIn - we need to take the word seriously.
What do we need to write well? What is the difference between a good text and a bad one? First of all, writing is knowing how to look. Great writers are surgeons who examine reality with the scalpel of the word. The journalist José F. Peláez recently published a brilliant article in which he exhorted the reader to look at the details that no one observes: "You ask me to teach you to write and I tell you to look at the hands of the man in the pharmacy, at the pain he hides behind his sunglasses, at why his hands are beginning to grow armour, like a tortoise's. You ask me to teach you to write and I tell you to look at the hands of the man in the pharmacy, at the pain he hides behind his sunglasses, at why his hands are beginning to grow armour, like a tortoise. You ask me to teach you to write and I tell you to first understand what a man's heart hides, what he fears, how long it is since he has been kissed, what happened so that his house is no longer a home". Knowing how to look is, in this sense, a personal and intimate looking, which is not based on an objective description, but on what we feel in relation to something; what stands between us and reality.
Only those who write well are detail-oriented. It is becoming more and more common for readers to look for epic and moving stories, and to believe that a good story can only be heroic - there are many examples in the cinema. However, our character does not have to be a hero, nor does he or she have to carry the fate of a people. The most important thing is not what is told, but how it is told. The old man and the seaHemingway's best known work, tells the story of a poor fisherman's obsession with a fish. Only Hemingway could make a masterpiece out of this trivial pursuit. We write well when we turn a simple event into grace, when the colour of our character's socks or the glasses he wears determine the story.
To know how to play with words-and to know how to think-you have to read a lot.
Writing is also knowing how to read, the best way of cultivating intelligence (from Latin inter-legerewhich means reading between the lines). Reading takes time and effort, and is not, although they want to sell it that way, a hobby or some other form of entertainment. My parents used to punish me on summer days if I didn't finish the day's chapter. I remember it as a mind-numbing activity after lunch and thought it was an absolute waste of time. So much for Robinson Crusoe getting bored and going mad on an uninhabited island, or Roald Amundsen returning home victorious after conquering the South Pole in 1911. My parents used to tell me that reading was the basis of a good education, and I reproached them that it was the basis of a good siesta.
The proliferation of writing courses offering "revolutionary" techniques for learning how to write reflects an obsession with cutting through the effort involved in the craft. They sell the idea that it is not necessary to spend hours and hours reading what others have told us, and that, with a couple of tips, we will achieve our own original style. However, the great writers never conceived of writing as a technique and were generally voracious readers. My parents were very clear: to know how to play with words - and to know how to think - you have to read a lot.
A common failing in the professional world is impostural writing, where simple words are replaced by high-flown, cultured synonyms. Dressing up the style works when you have mastered the language, but if you haven't, you can see through it. Changing words to make the text seem more cultured and complex is usually not a good idea. At Paris was a partyHemingway, apart from describing his gastronomic appetites and his favourite restaurants in the French capital - it is a good idea to read the book on a full stomach - tells us how he learned to get rid of impostures: "As soon as I began to write like a stylist, or like one who presents or exhibits, it turned out that this work of phylactery and scrollwork was superfluous, and it was better to cut and put the first simple, truthful indicative sentence I had written at the head". Simplicity as opposed to voluptuousness, clarity as opposed to confusion, honesty as opposed to the vanity that pretends to show a false mastery of language. That is why we should not complicate what is simple, nor, on the other hand, simplify what is complex.
Form is as important as substance. In this sense, there is an abundance of empty and insubstantial articles, despite their lexical juggling, which are tiring and based on repetitive and very unoriginal ideas. It is remarkable how many articles in the first level media start like this: "The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated digitalisation". Either we have something new (newsworthy) to say, or it is preferable to remain silent. Communicating without contributing is a waste of time and a nuisance for the reader.
Without words there is no humanity. Great civilisations are characterised by a special cultivation of letters and sciences. "Words are a rebellion against death," the writer Rafael Narbona posted on Twitter; they are an act of freedom. A society that does not respect its language impoverishes its culture and enslaves itself. Barbarism does not take place in silence, but in stultified speech. George Orwell had the audacious intuition that violence and social imposition consist in controlling language and falsifying the past. So yes, everything is at stake in language.